


No Such Place

by Mithrigil



Series: Self-Evident [10]
Category: Arthurian Legend, Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre: 500 A.D., Coming-of-age, F/M, Gen, M/M, Name magic, arthuriana, the Fair Folk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the fifth century A.D., Rome fell and abandoned Britannia to the Germanic invasion, and Britannia fell in love with a hero. This is not the King Arthur story you think it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> England is referred to as "Albion" or Britannia throughout this story, because he technically isn't England yet--though that is about to change. Wales is called Cymry, and Scotland Caledonii, for the same reasons.

**449 A.D.**

"Britannia," Rome says from the doorway.

Albion hasn't heard that voice in years—almost half a century. The fae sputter angrily and scurry away, leaving Albion's back unprotected. Rome sounds—well, _ill,_ older and worn, as if Rome is recovering from a wound in his throat. Was it inflicted sometime after Boadicea drove him off? Or is—

Albion doesn't turn around, and goes back to mending his shoe.

"C'mon, Britannia, I know I'm not a ghost yet." There are steps on the stone floor. He's coming nearer. "I won't stay long, I can't, I'm just here to fend off your big brothers and then I don't know what's—"

"Talk," Albion says, still without turning, and he doesn't put the needle in his hand down either.

Even if he can't see it, he knows what Rome's smiles feel like. "You're still feisty," Rome says, and "I still like it," and his shadow chills Albion's back. "I guess it's too much to ask you to look at me when I'm talking to you?"

"You don't tend to ask for things," Albion reminds him.

Rome laughs. "I don't at that." It's the same laugh as ever, and it makes Albion shiver. "And it's not as if I can change, right? Not like you, you're still a boy…"

That—_almost_ gives Albion enough pause to turn around. Almost. "Just say what you want to say."

"Well, maybe you can't change after all." He steps closer—did his foot drag? No, no, Albion won't look. "It's more important than a lot of the things I've told you, you know."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Another laugh, overhead; Albion curls over his mending, brandishes the needle. Rome stops, though, and only speaks. "You were serious, weren't you? About wanting to be a bigger empire than I."

There's no need to answer that; Rome _knows_.

"Thought so. So when you do—when you try, I mean, you're going to try, whether you do it or not—don't do it the way I did. 'Cause, well, I think, I did it wrong."

Something drips onto Albion's shoulder.

He won't scream. He won't scream, and he won't flinch, but that doesn't mean he'll look. He _won't_ look. "I could have told you that."

"You could have. You might have." Rome's hand comes down on Albion's upper arm. It's—it's _cold_, for Rome, not what Albion remembers, not—

—not enough for Albion to hold back from stabbing it with the needle.

Rome doesn't cry out in pain. Rome doesn't make a sound at _all_, or at least not one that comes out of his throat. His skin, though—his skin squelches.

Albion is hauled up by the shoulders, and slams his eyes shut, won't look, won't look. "Go _away_," he yells, and he wishes that magic _worked_ on Rome so he could Name him.

"I will," Rome says. "I am. That's the point."

Albion shivers in the dark behind his eyes. Rome has him, by the neck and the wrist and the voice—Rome draws Albion's hand nearer, and puts it on his body—

"I told you. I think I did it wrong."

The wound is warm and swollen, sticking and foul. Something bubbles and _pops_ where Albion is forced to touch, and he smells filth and fire. Rome guides Albion's fingers through _all_ of it, a deep puncture with ridged walls and scabs that peel away under Albion's nails, and Albion wants to yell and scream and run and drown himself in the nearest river and can't.

"There you go," Rome murmurs, laughing to himself, laden pained laughter that makes Albion's throat stop up. "That's my warning to you, boy. That's the end I'm coming to. I thought you could stand to know."

Albion still can't speak, but he thinks that last whimper sounded somewhere between _no_ and _how?_

Rome sighs. Albion _feels it._ "Remember I told you, you have to know your enemies?"

Albion nods, or hangs his head to stop it from spinning.

"I really should practise what I preach, huh." Rome—Rome ruffles Albion's hair, his thick chapped fingers pushing through the mess of it, thumbing at Albion's eyebrows. "I forgot mine. I thought he loved me for a second."

As Rome lets his hands off Albion's wrist and face, Albion stands still, eyes ground shut, fists clenching around the filth from Rome's wound. Rome takes him by the hand again, forcibly uncurls Albion's fist—hisses in pain, and then drops the needle into Albion's palm.

"You might not want to keep using this," he says.

Albion cries. But if he doesn't open his eyes, the tears won't come out, right?

Rome can hear it, though; Albion knows that his throat is throbbing, that his nose is filling up, that even if the tears aren't escaping the sounds that come with them are. Rome cups Albion's cheeks, thumbs at his lips and nostrils and the aching hollows under his eyes, and says, "That's something I haven't seen before. You hid that from me, didn't you, Britannia?" When Albion doesn't answer him, Rome embraces him, crushes him to his chest. "It worked."

The wound smears over Albion's cheek. He kicks Rome and turns and _runs,_ out of the room and out of the house, all the way to the river. When it's over his head, he opens his eyes, stares into the water until it stings. He comes up for air and pretends the tears never came at all, and scrubs his hands with gravel until they bleed.

-

**Sometime not quite 500 A.D….**

Albion now makes his home on the cliffs where Rome first found him. He has tired of the river that runs east, and its city, and its bridges. The fae keep to him now, and comfort him, and tell him that he is _his own_ again, and no matter how often Albion asks them, _am I meant to feel so empty?_, they do naught but laugh, and if it is meant to be less cruel than Rome's laughter Albion does not think so.

His dearest unicorn (whose name is Gregarious but Albion calls him _Grigory_ so as not to be cruel) strolls with him along the precipice in companionable silence. They watch the water push against the rocks, and kick smaller stones down to join it, Grigory with his nose and hooves, Albion with his toes. He never did mend that shoe, and wears none now, letting the earth harden his feet. The pebbles fall so far that Albion can't hear them, but he knows that Grigory can because the unicorn makes a little excited _huff_ sound just after Albion sees them splash.

The years should have been happier with Rome gone, and not just gone but _gone_, surely; if a Nation has been wounded so deeply, even an Empire, he will die, just as a man so afflicted will die. Albion pats Grigory on the flank, and then strokes all the way up to his cheek, making the unicorn turn and meet his eyes. He asks, not what he so often does, but "Have I gotten smaller?"

Grigory tilts his head, confused.

Albion closes his eyes, shakes his head to dismiss his own question. "Forgive me," he says, and resumes his petting. "It's just that for my kind, the more people who want us, the bigger we grow. So now that Rome's gone, I thought I might be smaller again and not notice."

In response, Grigory lifts his neck, pulls up to his full height over Albion, even going up on his hind legs a moment. Albion feels he ought laugh, it does look comical, but though the gesture is funny its meaning is not. But Albion smiles, at least, the jibe is not mean-spirited—

Grigory screams, and staggers sideways, spraying crystalline red blood on Albion's cheek.

An arrow—there's an arrow through him, from the side that faced the cliffs—deep in him, deep enough that both sides are bulging and Grigory is _down_. Albion pulls the unicorn's head into his lap and touches him, urgently now, making him look up, "Look at me, Grigory, look now—see, I'm here, if you can see me you can get up, come on, Grigory, get up—"

—it's not the first arrow to fly, there's another and another and another—one hits Grigory in the belly, it's foul, things _leak_ and smear over his silver hide and Albion bows over him to save himself from the hail.

It terrifies him, makes him shake; someone who can see the fae. Someone who can _shoot_ them.

Grigory whines, tongue frothing and teeth bared. His mouth is framed in pink and gold, his horn buried in the tall grass.

Albion is taller than the grass.

He looks up, over the edge of the cliff, to the other side of the channel. His breath calls up a spell that will let him see that far; he is a Nation, and cannot be barred from that. A row of ships is advancing, cruder than Rome's but no less majestic, of darker wood with lighter sails. At the prow of the foremost ship stands a man with long golden hair, in plaits that beat on his armour in the wind, and he carries a bow that is taller than he. With the aid of the spell, Albion can even see the Nation's eyes; they are as blue as Grigory's horn.

When Grigory pleads with him again, Albion takes out his dagger and stabs him through the eye, to end it fast. As the arrows fall around him, he saws the unicorn's horn from its head, and leaves the rest to haunt the Saxons.

-

Albion runs. Dagger out, toes bleeding, the scent of Grigory still threaded in his cloak and the fae snapping overhead and at his heels, he _runs_, away from the cliffs and the coast and the tall grass. Wings flap behind him, the larger fae and the birds that can hear them, crows and hawks and owls, and soon their screeches drown out Albion's feet crushing the fallen leaves.

_Again,_ he thinks, and _worse,_ and _more,_ and _Rome, you bastard, they're here for you, not me._ There comes a rhythm to it, attuned to his breath as it heaves and lags. _Not for me. Not for me._

The forest gives way to a field, and the light of the fae chasing him bleaches every blade of grass. Albion closes his eyes, bolts across it, west, away from the light and the sun. He doesn't care if it's Cymry's place, Cymry should know too—

"Oof—hey—ow!"

Albion crashes into something—well, more to the point, some _one_. He opens his eyes—it's okay to cry when you're hurt, and he skinned his knees on the way down, and he should tell the person sorry and move on and—

"—Ow…" the person under Albion—a boy, a human boy? with hair that's about the colour of river carp and a very skinny body—groans, trying to sit up with Albion still tangled in his lap. "Watch where you're going!"

Albion wrinkles his nose at him. He doesn't say sorry, but he does untangle himself and sit back on his knees. His feet—his feet don't feel like running anymore.

The boy scrunches up his nose too, but it's more like a twitch. "Is there a battle? Whose city are you coming from?"

_Right,_ Albion thinks, _Grigory's blood. Oh, and mine._ "I'm very tired," he says, which isn't really an answer, but it's true either way, and once he falls asleep in the strange boy's lap there's nothing else to be done for it.

 

_Grigory is on his feet. He is still dead, of course, but that doesn't matter where Albion is now. Without his horn—with a bulb of flies and maggots where it should be—his head is bowed low to the ground, and his bloodshot eyes are glowing. But he is still Grigory and Albion still wants to hold him, so he does._

Albion can see all of himself now—he's crossed into a place not his own, a silver stone castle on a hill. The Saxons climb over the cliffs, and that golden-haired man is leading them, taking slow steps that cover miles. They retrace the rivers inland, up toward Caledonii and his Picts, west to Cymry's place, and all between. Albion swings himself up onto the dead unicorn's back and ignores the blood that wells up against his thighs, and Grigory carries him, as swiftly as only the dead can be, to walk beside the golden-haired man.

The golden-haired man looks at him, his eyes steady and hateful and sad. He asks Albion if he is Rome's.

Albion does not answer him.

 

Something very bony is caught between Albion's legs, and he realises that he didn't sleep alone.

He's _very_ awake now; he turns his head and tries to reach down for his dagger or Grigory's severed horn, but someone's removed his belt, presumably the someone who's currently wrapped around Albion like an eager squirrel on a tree. When Albion can turn enough and focus he can see that it's the human boy from last night. His nose is buried in the crook of Albion's shoulder, and their knees are all tangled together under two starchy blankets and on top of a third, which is itself mostly atop a heap of straw.

_Oh,_ thinks Albion, _that's all right, then._

He tries not to stir so much, and looks the human boy over. He appears a little younger than Albion is now; under ten years old, surely, with his round ruddy face and no hair anywhere but his head, and there's a lot of that. It probably curls when it is clean, which right now it isn't. Naked as they are, the human boy is nearly as skinny as Albion, and it's worse for being the scrawny sort of skinny, like Albion had been before Rome started training him. Albion pokes the boy's upper arm, and there's not much muscle there at all. He probably can't shoot or swordfight very well yet.

That poke does wake him up, though.

Albion tries to turn his face away and bury it in the straw. It doesn't work, and he ends up getting a mouthful of the boy's hair. And some of it gets between his teeth too. Albion grimaces. The boy smiles.

"Are you better?"

"Did something happen?" Albion scrunches his nose.

The boy does too, and laughs. "Well, you fell over. And you couldn't walk anymore. So I brought you here."

"Where is here?"

"My uncle's fortress. I serve his son. They're Briton, though."

"You're not?" Albion doesn't mean to sound disappointed, just—

"Nu-uh. Well, they say I'm not. My uncle and my cousin, I mean. And they're Christians too. But if King Emrys says I'm his nephew that means his brother is my father and if he's Briton his brother must be Briton too so I don't know how that works."

_Emrys,_ Albion thinks, and translates, _Ambrosius,_ and says, "I made it to Dinas Emrys?"

"Well, you made it almost here. I carried you the rest of the way. Was there a battle? Uncle told me to warm you and make sure you woke up in case you had a message. Do you have a message?" The boy clings to him, props himself up on his elbow so he can look down at Albion and then cover his own mouth, remembering, "Oh—you never said whether you were better! Should you be sleeping?"

"No, I—I wasn't wounded, just tired. I ran from the Channel. From Dubris."

The boy's eyes go _wide_—like a fish, again. "You ran all the way from Dubris?"

"There are Saxons there." _Saxony himself is there._ "They shot my friend."

"I'm sorry," the boy says, and bites his lip. "Was that whose blood was on you?"

"Yes—" and Albion realises he's unarmed, "—and his horn, too, his horn was with my weapons and—"

"Don't worry, they're right over there." When the boy lifts his hand to point, he loses his balance and falls on top of Albion, and Albion goes _oof_, and the boy says "Sorry!" again and scrambles, and soon they're tangling and laughing and Albion can't remember caring about a human this much, not even Boadicea.

He won't ask the boy's name, that's not polite, but soon they're holding each other in the straw and the blankets and _laughing_ and Albion whispers, "What do people call you?"

"Arth," he says, "because I yelled like a bear when I was little and didn't speak at all else. They call me _Wart_ now, even though I haven't got any. What do people call you?"

His true Name catches in his throat. "Britannia," he says, it's true enough.

"—But that's a girl's name. Shouldn't it be Britannicus? Or Pretani, if it's where you're from, not who you are?"

"No," Albion says, "I—_am_ Britannia."

The boy—Wart, Albion decides, _Wart_—looks at him only a little harder than before, and smiles, wide-and gap-toothed. "Oh." And then, innocent and eager, "That must make it a lot easier to run all the way from the Channel!"

-

Wart's uncle is Ambrosius Aurelianus, and this fortress is _Dinas Emrys_, and if Cymry is anywhere he should be here. Once Wart has gotten Albion some clothes and run to tell his uncle that the messenger is awake and the Saxons have invaded, Albion is running over the dragon-flues with his finger pricked, tracing between the wood and mortared stone and calling his brother.

_By Name, if I have to,_ he threatens in the spell. _So you'd better come now, Cymry, I know you can hear me—_

"If it isn't the runt," Cymry says, bored as ever, and when Albion turns around to glare at him he's sitting on the nearest tree, his long legs dangling well over Albion's head. "So Rome's done with you?"

"Rome's _dead,_" Albion snaps, "or very nearly, and this has nothing to do with it."

"Of course it doesn't." Cymry's got a small sling-stone in his hand, and is rolling it between his spindly fingers, walking it over the knuckles and looking at _that_ instead of Albion. "You think that _Germania's_ invading because he wants you?"

—well there goes the message. "You knew?"

"Hard not to, runt. I'll tell you, though; he's not. He wants _Rome_, and he thinks that Rome left something in you for him to finish off." Cymry throws down the stone. "Yes, it _is_ all your fault."

Albion bites his own thumb and sucks on the blood, glaring up at him. "Well it's probably good for you to fend them off too."

"As far as my borders," Cymry says. "It's not my place to clean up after you."

Albion sneers at him. "You don't understand. Saxony can see the fae—"

"That's their problem, then, isn't it."

"It's our problem too!" He takes Grigory's horn out of his belt and holds it up, makes sure Cymry can see it even if he pretends he doesn't. "They're like what we are, aren't they?"

Cymry jumps down from the branch and snatches Grigory's horn right out of Albion's hand. He's so tall—is he taller than Caledonii now? thinner, yes, but maybe taller—that even when Albion jumps he can't reach it. But Cymry isn't laughing at him, just looking the horn over, holding it close to his eyes and nose.

"No, they're not," he says, and starts walking away—and taking the horn with him. "And it's disrespectful of you to think so. Not to mention act so."

"It's not—"

"It is," Cymry says, "to _us_."

Albion catches up with Cymry and kicks him behind the knee. He gets thrown down the hill for his trouble—but just before he hits his head against a tree he thinks that at least it worked.

 

_ "Welcome," the dragon says._

Albion sits up and nods to him. There's no light here at all, except for what's haloing the dragon's one visible eye. He doesn't know which dragon it is—there are supposed to be two of them—but the pervasive smell of blood and the fact that the dragon is addressing Albion at all makes him think that it's Cymry's, the red one, beneath this hill. Unless the white dragon plays with little Nations before he eats them. "Hallo," he tells the dragon in kind, deciding it doesn't matter. "Are you better?"

"Was I ill?" the dragon returns without humour.

"Hundreds of years ago. But are you better?"

The dragon touches his cold tongue to Albion's nose. Albion flinches but not away, and soon it is darker around him as the dragon's wings close in. In the scant light, he sees that he was wrong, and the scales are leathery white.

 

This time, Wart wakes _him_ up.

It's very quick; one moment Albion is convinced that he's going to be eaten up, and then next he's being shaken and touched and subject to "Britannia, Britannia?" over and over in a voice that for just one petrefying moment sounds like Rome all over again.

Which would explain why the first word out of Albion's mouth is a very loud "No!"

But then Wart isn't touching him anymore and there's straw flying everywhere and—and Wart is sniveling.

Albion blinks and covers his mouth. "I mean—" That doesn't work so he uncovers it and tries again, "Wart, I'm sorry, it was—"

"A witch-dream?" Wart wipes his nose, and maybe comes a little closer. "I'm sorry. I have them too. Did I become part of it?"

"—yes," Albion thinks, stuttering a little on it. "But not as you. You have bad dreams?" he asks, eager to get off the subject of his own.

"Mhm." He scoots forward on his knees; it is cold outside the blankets, and it looks as if he wants to duck back under them, but thinks Albion won't let him. "But I don't remember them when I do. I try to forget," he says sheepishly. "Cai says that's best."

"Who's Cai?"

"My cousin. He's going to be a warlord like uncle Emrys! I told you, I serve him. Can I come under the blankets again?"

Albion smiles and lifts them a little.

Wart scrambles under, and it kicks some of the straw away but now that they're both under it's going to be warmer anyway. Albion drapes one of his arms out and Wart settles against him, coltish knee to even more coltish knee. They pull the blankets over their heads, and Albion thinks that total dark might be worse but he's not about to admit it.

"Do you forget your dreams?"

"I don't forget anything," Albion says. "Well. I try not to. Sometimes I remember wrong. But I do remember."

"Even dreams?"

"Even dreams. Bad ones especially." The good ones are rarer and harder to forget.

"What was this one about?"

"The dragons under the fort. I spoke to the wrong one. He's stronger than _Y Ddraig Goch_, and he ate me. I think Vortigern wanted him to eat me."

He can feel Wart's nose wrinkle against his neck. "Who's Vortigern?"

Albion thinks a little, and tries, "Gwerthym."

For a moment, Wart stops breathing. Albion pokes him. "S-sorry. I think that's something I forgot."

"He thought he was one of my kings," Albion explains. "I think he must be dead now. Or Saxon, which is worse."

"Uncle Emrys says they're going to invade."

"They already have. That's why I'm here."

Wart nods. He doesn't quite hold Albion closer, but it _is_ cold out there, and they lean nearer together. "Then we're going to meet them in battle, aren't we?"

"Sooner or later," Albion says.

"Good," Wart says, "that'll make Cai happier. He so wants to fight. And he says that Saxons are good for killing, because you don't go to hell if you do."

"Have you ever killed anyone?"

"My mother. Uncle Emrys says so. Or he says that father said so anyway. But I don't think I meant it. I would have liked to know her."

Albion closes his eyes. It's even darker behind them, and redder somehow. "My mother is dead too."

"Nations have mothers?"

"Yes," Albion says, very softly, because it _is_ a secret. "Sometimes, at least. And I have brothers, too, and a sister. They miss Mother too, I think."

Wart whispers as if it's not just a secret, but a precious thing; it's as if his words are cradled in air. "Did you know her long?"

"Not very. My brothers think I killed her too. That's why they hate me."

—He's never told anyone that before.

-

"I won't be joining you," Cymry says, some months later when Emrys has gotten the army together.

"I don't _need_ you," Albion responds in kind. "Give me back Grigory's horn."

Cymry says, without laughing, "No."

-

"No, like this," Albion says, and makes a diagonal overhand cut, then reverses it. "See how much more chance you have of hitting the enemy that way?"

"Yes," Wart says, and bites his lip before mimicking the effect, not as poorly as he used to. He's about Albion's size now; it's been more than three years, and they've gained a swathe of ground all the way across Mercia, and it shows on them both but especially Wart, who actually is growing. He's still thin as a reed, though, for all the work Cai makes him do, and the best Albion can do is teach him to use it.

His stomach churns whenever he says something that Rome once taught him. But whenever it works, there's this buzz at the base of his skull, like the one he gets when he dances with the fae or eats the honey that goes into mead, and then Wart laughs and smiles and _it's all right, then._

They make another two dozen of that same cut. These are real swords, _spatha_ they dug up from an old stone fortress at Venonis. So they're longer and heavier than perhaps either of them should be swinging about, much less making cuts in the air with, but it should put some muscle in Wart's arm this way.

When it's time, Albion says, "Next one," and demonstrates a backhand cut straight across the middle. "This won't work again until you're taller, but it's good now. Imagine someone Cai's size in front of you." Wart closes his eyes and does. "Now make the cut. Where did you hit him?"

"Over his knees," Wart says. "Oh! I get it! And it won't work until I'm big because until then the chest armour gets in the way!"

Wart hasn't seen battle yet; the army has, but Emrys keeps the young boys out of it, taking care of the horses and the supplies and the treasure while the bigger men fight. Albion's stayed by Wart most of the time—it wouldn't be good for Saxony to find him. But he knows Wart has seen what kind of armour a Saxon wears because it's their job—it's the job of all the youngest ones—to go out among the dead and take what's theirs.

They cheerfully practise that cut, again and again. Wart never complains about his arm being tired, but Albion's is growing so, and he decides, "Only one more today. And not a cut, a stab."

Wart nods. "We're not going to actually do that though, right?"

"—oh. Maybe we should wait until after a battle so you can stab someone who's already dead so it won't matter."

"Right. And there's to be a battle a little south of here, Uncle thinks. Sometime before the moon changes again." Wart stretches, with the sword over his head—it drags his arm down, and he drops it in the grass. Albion laughs, and so does Wart, and when they're mostly done with that they gather their things and return to the camp.

 

_Albion has not revealed himself to Ambrosius Aurelianus. It is not for any dislike of the man—beyond, well, that for a claimant Briton he is as Roman as they come, from his golden skin to his ties to an Emperor who is now quite dead. But though Albion has spoken of the arrival of Germania at Dubris, and the strength of their forces, Albion does no more than serve him as a page and scout. It has been a short enough time, and no man bats an eye at how Albion has not grown, and Wart is mum on the matter as well._

But dreams come, bidden or un-; perhaps of Ambrosius, or Emrys, or whatever posterity shall call him. In the dreams, when they are good, this campaign is successful, and lasts only another year or less—all lands are his from Viroconium to Camulodunum, from the cliffs of Dubris in the south to Hadrian's Wall in the north—no, beyond that, beyond that, if Emrys is that skilled he will take all of Caledonii's lands for Albion too, and wrest Cymry's from him, and all of the island will be Albion's—and Wart will see it too, and not as fields of corpses and their spoils.

So in these dreams, the good ones, he addresses Emrys Wledig, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and grows tall enough to see into his eyes and thank him.

And in the bad dreams, he remembers that Ambrosius is Roman.

 

Wart will wake Albion up after the worst of them. It's a very gentle thing, now, just a hand over Albion's eyes or a whispered, _shh, any louder and I won't be the only one to hear you_. Sometimes they really are the wrong things to say and do—and Wart gets skittish and apologises, but by then Albion's awake and it's not anyone's problem but his.

Albion tells all his dreams; Wart doesn't have to ask anymore. So he knows about Rome, and about Albion's older brothers and sister and how cruel they are to him, and about the fae. Wart loves the fae and wishes he could see them. Albion tells him that he probably can and just doesn't know it.

"Does it hurt, to be a Nation?"

"…As much as it hurts to be a human, I suppose," Albion says, "but I've not tried it, so I don't know."

These past three years—almost four!—Albion's learned how to tell when Wart is smiling, even in the dark. "Can you? Try to be human, I mean?"

"I don't think so. Can you try to be a Nation?"

Wart laughs. "Well, I _do_ think so. I mean, I don't think I can make myself not get any older like you but if you tell me what it's like to be you aside-from-that I can try."

Albion holds him close, and thinks it over. "All right."

"And if I can be you then you can be me! So tell me what it's like."

…Albion laughs too. "Well…well, it means that what happens to the land happens to me. And the people in it too. I mean, if there's a famine I'm hungry even if I have food of my own, or if there's a storm it makes my bones ache even if where I actually am is dry."

Wart nods.

"It's also a kind of being everywhere, not just where I am. Which is a bit like what I already said, I guess, but not quite. It means I'm thinking about my people in Durnovaria even when I'm up here in Verulamium, and the people guarding the wall up north even if the Saxons can't get there. If it's really important I can actually get to them too, but I'm always thinking about it, and I can see it if I try. Some of the dreams are really that."

"So that's how you know what the Saxons are doing even if they're too far off to scout."

"Yes. Because they're doing things to my people, and my people are me."

Wart holds him a bit closer, a bit tighter. "That's hard to think about."

"Good things too," Albion says. "I feel the victories out there even when we're losing here. Your uncle isn't the only one fighting, you know. It—it feels very good, when my biggest brother can't pass the wall. Even if it's a wall Rome built to keep him out, it's still my wall. So even when it's hard here, with you, there's that."

"It's…it's hard to be here with me?"

Albion gulps. "No, no, not at all. But war is." He lowers his voice, he hadn't told it to get louder but it did, and— "War hurts, even when I don't do any of the fighting."

"Because the soldiers are your people, and your people are you."

"Right."

"Where does it hurt?"

"All manner of places. But—but all wars are different. I mean, a famine hurts your belly and a storm hurts your bones, but war…_this_ war hurts all over, because Saxony just wants me for his, or gone. Probably gone."

"Saxony is a man too?"

"Yes."

"What's he like?"

Albion shudders, like a bowstring, like _that_ bowstring. "Saxony—Rome called him Germania, so I think he's _all_ of the tribes, not just one, but… He's a very large man, almost a giant. He has long, straight hair, and he wears it in braids. He wears armor like the things we've stolen from the field, but cleaner, like he has someone to shine it," _like I shined Rome's_, "and he carries a sword on his back and a bow that's bigger than he is."

Wart is…is _listening_, like it's a story.

"I've never spoken to him. But I've seen him the way my people see him, and I've seen him myself, and Rome used to tell me things too, so—so I know Rome didn't like him, but wanted him all the same. I know he's proud, and very strong and…and not mean, but he doesn't have any mercy. Or at least he tries not to have any."

"And you have to fight him?"

"Probably."

"But you're so small."

"Well yes, but…but maybe I'll grow in time."

"What makes you grow?"

"Being wanted," Albion says.

"Well, _I_ want you," Wart says, and holds him tight. Well now, there's getting to be a bit of strength in his arms. "Will that work? If I want you a lot?"

Albion smiles, and holds him right back. "I hope so."

-

"Camulodunum is in sight, sire." Another two years, and the band has nearly cut the south off from the north entirely.

"Praise God," Ambrosius says, and unrolls a map. "Their numbers?"

"Six hundred horse at least, and four times that on foot," Albion says. But he leaves out, _and their Nation, who has seen that I am here._

"So they have numbers." Ambrosius gives Albion a _look_. "Do we have surprise?"

"I don't think so."

"What do we have, then?"

Albion closes his eyes. "All the ground we've gained already. They should be afraid of us by now."

That makes Ambrosius smile, briefly. They talk for a while more, about the dispersal of the Saxon forces, about how they're making use of all the earthwork that Albion himself dug five centuries ago (or six?) to keep everyone else out, and all else that Albion has seen. It isn't enough, and he'll look for more, but he can't tell Ambrosius much more than that.

Well, he could. But he doesn't _want_ to, somehow.

 

_From the highest point in Camulodunum, Albion can see the Mare Germanica, and knows that the name does not deserve the sea._

He can see from the highest point in Camulodunum, even though he isn't there himself, because his people are. Some of them are dying; those are easier to usurp the eyes of, since their minds are half-gone. Many of them see their killers before they fall. Others see those outside the battle, those beacons of stillness in the chaos. Albion sees Saxony, efficient and terrifying, his plaits banded with gold and tipped with blood, his sword much the same. The battle is lost, Albion is certain of it, and it's worse that he knows he isn't there.

So he looks through the eyes of the dying men, shuts out the sounds of their failing bodies, and watches in one battle, six years of war undone. Ambrosius Aurelianus calls a retreat, and the man whose body Albion is watching through reaches out to beg him, no, stay, my king, I am not yet dead.

And no, that man is not yet dead; he is not yet dead when the squires of the Saxons come rifling through the bodies, unclasping armor and uncoupling swords, ripping arrows out of the warrior's wounds before the scabs trap them in. There are dozens of boys, like Wart was and Albion might be, and they scrabble through the corpses for weapons and coins and rations, and all but the eldest blink back tears at the stench.

A boy comes to Albion—to the body Albion is seeing through—and looks into the eyes. The boy is—is beautiful, Albion thinks, even if his face and nose are smeared with blood. He is mostly naked, plainly older than Albion, with fine curly hair the colour of the sun, and eyes that are blue but have no ice in them at all. He leans close, his face almost against the dying man's mouth, and between the smells of filth and death Albion cannot breathe—

The beautiful, perfect, lucky boy blinks at Albion, and then calls over his shoulder:

**Maman! Maman, this one still lives.**

 

"Britannia! Britannia, stop—"

"Wart?" Oh god, there's no one there to hold, just the bodies and the grass and the arrows—that's how this one dies, arrows, they never hit him where he wanted and—

"—yes, Britannia, yes, it's me, just me—Britannia, _stop_—"

"—My _Name,_" he chokes, "—is _A—_"

"Shh." Hands clamp onto Albion's shoulders, they're Wart's, they'd better be, if they're not Albion's going to rip them out and the arms right with them and "—Britannia, what happened?"

Albion tries to look and can't, and if he can't look he'll just lean, topple until his head hits something. It does, before the straw and the blankets; his forehead hits cured leather. Wart is wearing armour now, he's almost old enough for it and almost, after a battle like that, is good enough.

Wart whispers, to answer for him, "You were at the battle, weren't you."

"So were you." When Albion catches some of his breath, it forces his cheeks into a wry smile. "I can smell it."

"Sorry." He pulls Albion closer. "Cai fell. I took his horse."

"Is he dead?"

"I think so. He's not back yet."

"Now _I'm_ sorry—"

"Britannia." Wart slips a hand under Albion's chin, and makes him turn it up. "Tell me what you saw."

The curtain to the room is open, and there are torches in the hallway, and more than half of Wart's face is bathed in the light. He's still smooth-cheeked, except for all the grit that's on him, and still skinny. His hair's filthy too, caked into points instead of curls and so thick with muck that Albion can't see the colour at all. The armour's too big and the tunic's too small but the cowl of his cape is just right and fixes both of those, and even if there aren't any more gaps in his teeth he's _Wart_ and that's enough.

"Well I know we lost," Albion mutters, to start. "Most of what I saw was…after that."

He doesn't cry, so Wart doesn't move, Albion knows that's how it works. Wart just prompts Albion with his eyes, with the faintest of nods.

"Saxony isn't the only Nation there." All that comes out with the better part of Albion's breath, and he closes his eyes, takes time to recover the rest. "I was in the body of a dead man, one of ours—well, almost dead—and you know, they do what we do, when the battle's over, they go out and pick the corpses apart just like you and I did, remember?"

"I remember."

"And there was a boy, not as old as you, but bigger than I—and he started picking my body apart like a crow. His skin was like that too, like a bird's foot. He had—he had very long fingers on his hands. And when he saw I wasn't yet dead, he—he called for his mother. She was dead, you know. Dead but not. Dead but _there_. I—"

Wart—Wart puts his hand through Albion's hair. "You don't have to say it."

"Yes I do!" It'll just…take him a while. He gathers the breath for it, tries again. "She was walking. Her body was alive. But when the boy called her over I could see into her eyes and there was nothing there at all. She—she didn't _have_ any," he mouths, because that chills him to say, "there were holes where they should be and I could see all the way into her brain. It was rotten. But she was _alive_. And she was the boy's mother, and they were Nations like me—the woman was Gaul, Rome…Rome told me what he did to her, I just hadn't seen it before. And the boy was her son. _Their_ son. Or Germania's, I'm not sure. I don't think Rome was sure either. That's why he did it."

The torches flicker, just outside the curtain. One of them drowns. Wart shivers, and Albion does too.

"He—Germania, Saxony—he means to make a gift of me to that boy. That Nation. The one with the mother, why can _he_ have one, he doesn't have to bury his, and—and he's so beautiful, and—and I hate him—"

Wart clings to Albion before either of them can actually cry.

They together wind up leaning into and then settling onto the straw. The blankets are still between their legs, but their chests are touching, and even if the buckles of Wart's armour are scratching on Albion's chest he doesn't mind. And he doesn't mind that Wart smells like mud and the battle and the straw itches and he's kind of heavy and there are so many reasons for Albion to be angry and sad—but he _doesn't mind_, not like this.

"Wart?" he whispers, and makes it a question too.

He lifts his head from where it had nestled into Albion's shoulder. "Is something wrong?"

"—Yes." Albion whispers, and doesn't lie. "I don't want to be—"

"I know," Wart says, louder, and he probably _does_ know. "You shouldn't have to. I won't let it happen."

Albion thinks he's going to cry again. He doesn't want that to show either. But he can't turn his face away, Wart is _looking_ at him, and—

—and so he puts his hand in Wart's hair too and brings their faces closer instead.

It's hard to look when you're that close. Their foreheads are touching. Then their noses. Then their mouths. And—and it feels _good_ when their mouths touch, so Albion tries to keep it that way, and he remembers that when humans and the fae couple with each other they do this part too and he blushes.

Wart pulls away just enough to see that (though he could probably feel it anyway, Albion would swear that his cheeks are burning). Albion tries to turn away, but Wart's got a hand on the back of his head, so that doesn't work. "Britannia?"

"I'm sorry, I just—"

"You want to kiss me?"

Whatever the answer is—there may be more than one of them—it catches in Albion's throat and makes it swell.

Wart closes his eyes and opens them, too slow to be a blink. "Can Nations do that? I mean, with humans?"

Albion remembers, Rome, and all the times he— "Yes. Yes they can."

"Oh," Wart says, and smiles. "Good."

So they kiss and touch until they're too tired to anymore, and then they try to sleep, but that doesn't work. Albion squires Wart out of his armor, and they kiss for a while longer after that, curled together naked in the straw. And then in the morning, they do that again, until they're told that _it's time to break camp, the Saxons are coming._


	2. Chapter 2

**Sometime _around_ 500 A.D…**

It takes less time to lose ground than to gain it.

Of the eight years Albion has been afield with Ambrosius' clan, six of them were spent getting _to_ Camulodunum, and two of them retreating all the way back to Dinas Emrys. It could be worse: Cymry could know. He probably does, actually, but as long as he is more inclined to gloat silently Albion will give him no invitation to express his opinion of Albion's choice of hero.

The fortress seems to swell out of the earth like the egg of a spider, the surrounding trees shrinking beside the stone. Those left behind have reinforced it with dark stone and iron, in cruel swirling spires, staggered with tall slits for bowmen to fire through. Albion wonders if the dragons beneath the mound have suffered in turn.

He is beside Ambrosius—_Emrys,_ Albion corrects himself, within these walls he is to be _Emrys_—as the general is greeted by the armsman he left behind, with laughter. "Back so soon, your Majesty?"

"Let it not be in disgrace," Emrys says. "I trust we've the reserves to hold the heathens off?"

"Depends on how many of them there are, doesn't it?" He laughs again: Emrys doesn't, and neither does Albion, nor do any of the souls within earshot. But the grey armsman looks askance at all of them, his bushy white eyebrows tucking up with the wrinkles on his forehead, and challenges them to a man. "Well? How many are there?"

Albion, who knows better, answers with and for the rest: "Two thousand, four hundred of them horse."

"Well, that's not so bad," the armsman, says, much to _everyone's_ indignant surprise. "no, no hear me—"

"Or _me,_" says the younger but still not young man emerging from the fortress gate behind him, with Cymry at his side.

Albion hears the ash in Emrys' greeting. "I suppose you brought them with you from the wall, Wythr."

"Under _your_ flag, brother." Wythr grins—Albion shivers, and wishes that the corners of that man's mouth would hide behind his moustaches. "Many'll follow the dragon to his hoard."

"Well then I hope you promised them something we could spare."

"There'll be glory enough in this war," Wythr says, with a glance at Cymry behind him. "Men remember that, where Rome couldn't reach."

-

"Give me Grigory's horn."

"It's not a horn anymore, and no." Cymry rests his hand on the wall instead of the curtain, as if he never meant to pull it aside.

Albion snarls at his back. "What did you do with it?"

"I made use of it."

"I could have—"

"Not this. You don't think this way yet."

"I could—"

"No, you can't. You're too busy playing at war, runt."

"It's not playing!"

"Fine, then it's losing." Now Cymry opens his eyes—they'd been closed?—and tugs the curtain aside, takes a torch in his other hand and steps into the dark. "Are you following me?"

"I know where you're going," Albion says.

Cymry _tsks_ between his teeth, but doesn't tell him not to follow.

The stone stairs wind down and become earth; the rich gold torchlight is thickened with its own smoke. Cymry ducks when the ceiling and walls grow tighter, but Albion has no such problem, and takes the steps, only once tripping up when the shadows swallow the hem of Cymry's cloak and he steps on it in the dark.

"Watch where you're going," Cymry sighs when he recovers.

Albion wrinkles his nose. "Watch we're you've been."

If Cymry rolls his eyes, op there, Albion cannot see it—and when the stairwell ends and the hollow begins, Albion can see nothing at all.

 

_The dragons are disturbed._

They're not fighting now—or not yet—or if they are they've taken a rest from it, and have closed to opposite sides of the cavern. Cymry goes to his red, or Albion thinks so at least, since the torchlight's nearly gone.

"Shh," Cymry says, stroking the dragon's flank. "How is it?"

The dragon raises his head from the earth, and Albion can feel it scrape and shake. "Cold," the dragon hisses in answer.

Cymry tells him, "Good," and continues to stroke him. The dragon purrs an unsteady rumble of steam, and it makes the torch flicker. Albion bends and takes up the hem of Cymry's cape, just in case. Of course Cymry chides him for it: "Scared, runt?"

Albion harrumphs. "The white dragon's still here too, you know."

Steam gathers and dribbles down, and the torch goes out entirely. "Tell me why I should care."

 

This isn't the sort of thing he wakes up screaming from, but Albion does shake, even after Wart twines his arms about him. Wart is nearly a real soldier now, so they have a place where the straw is packed into sewn cloth rather than just heaped under blankets, and Albion nestles into all of that at once.

"My brother is not afraid of this war at all," Albion tells Wart, when Wart perks up an ear and cheek to listen. "He thinks to let Saxony destroy me, and then content himself with that."

"But isn't it good, to not be afraid?"

Albion props himself up on his elbows, and looks at Wart to assure that there was only simplicity in those words.

It's true; Wart, though not a boy any more, clearly a young man, still has that acceptance and light behind his eyes that only the old and the young seem to keep. Scant hairs darker than the ones on his head frame the slight frown on his cheeks, and Albion remembers to ask him:

"Wythr is your father, isn't he?"

"He is," Wart says, "and he's not afraid either, you can see that. But he's not afraid because he's strong, and there's nothing wrong with knowing that."

"There is if the enemy knows you are too, and plans for it." Albion leans down and rests his chin on Wart's chest. There's going to be hair there too, isn't there. "How strong _is_ he?"

Wart considers a moment, rolling his eyes up in his head as if to count. "I don't know. I don't know _him_, really. But I do know that he makes me think he's strong enough."

"But that's dangerous," Albion says. "My eldest brother is like that. And so was Rome."

"Yes, but aren't they strong too?"

"—Well yes," Albion says, "but not strong _enough_. I mean. Rome's dead now, and Germania killed him, which means Germania is stronger, and—"

"And does that mean that my father might be stronger than your brother, even if he's a Nation?"

Albion frowns. So does Wart. But then Wart laughs while Albion is still trying to ponder it out, and he throws his arms over Albion's back and holds him closer.

"You're right," Wart says, "I don't know, I can't know. Yes he's my father but I don't know him at all, so he might be a braggart or—or worse, I don't know." His laughter is getting lower with the rest of his voice, and Albion can feel that where their chests are pressed together. "And he can't be stronger than a Nation. That's daft!"

Albion tries to smile, now that Wart is. It nearly works. "I don't know," he mutters, "you could be stronger than I, at least."

"Oh, could I?" Wart laughs again, and grips his hands on Albion's upper arms to hold him and lift, sort of. "Shall we test it?"

"I accept your challenge!" Albion, well, tries not to shout, and grabs onto Wart's arms to wrestle him too.

They tangle on the mattress, Wart's long arms and legs almost unwieldy compared to Albion's much shorter ones. Albion gets himself twined high on Wart's chest but Wart, well, _is_ stronger, and pries him off, half by the scruff of his neck. Once he gets Albion's back to the straw he tries to pounce, but Albion is quicker, and wriggles between Wart's legs to come out the other side and jump onto his back. Wart gasps, and almost cackles, and grabs ahold of Albion's ankles to spin him around and fling him off, onto the mattress again. He pins Albion down by the wrists and knees and kisses him, soundly and suddenly.

Albion is—Albion is just fine with that, even if it's a kind of being bested, and kisses Wart too. They've been kissing with tongues since they found out it was nice, so Albion opens his mouth and lets his slip out. Wart does as well, and they let their tongues do the tussling for a bit instead of their bodies. It's pleasant, this way, and warm, and so Albion fights it a little more, twists his body and tries to escape Wart's hold. "You can't—win me," he tries to say, and isn't sure how much of it gets out.

"I can," Wart says, stronger, "I've _got_ you," and this time Albion feels a little bit of teeth in the kiss but doesn't mind at all, since that means Wart is smiling. He smiles too, and bites on Wart's lip, and Wart—and Wart _moans_, and squirms, but not away.

Albion lets his teeth part, and lets Wart's lip go, but decides that's another way to win, and tries to capture it again. It's easy, starting with a kiss, and Albion chews on it a little this time, and Wart holds on tighter, presses down harder.

He's really rubbing himself against Albion now, steady strokes of his hips like he's riding a horse. When Albion lets his teeth off Wart's mouth, Wart pulls his face away and kisses Albion but not on the lips, on the chin, and before Albion can tell him that he missed he does it again but lower, under, and then on Albion's _neck_, right in the centre. Albion chokes, and the sound and heat go right to where Wart is kissing him.

Wart—Wart _bites_ him there, a little, not hard, just enough to speak through. Albion thinks he's saying _Britannia_ but isn't sure, there are other things he feels, around his wrists and on his thighs and between them, and—

—oh, oh no, _no_, not this.

He tries to say, _Wart, no,_ but only the name comes out, and that means Wart doesn't stop—doesn't stop kissing or rubbing that part of himself on Albion's thigh. Albion tenses up as much as he can, not in the fighting way but in the defending way—if his throat's too tight to say anything his body should be too, and Wart needs to know, Wart will stop if he knows.

"…Britannia?" His lips leave Albion's skin.

He knows.

"Oh—oh, Britannia, oh god—" All the glass leaves Wart's eyes, and all the heat, and he says it, pulling away. "What did I do, I don't—"

"No, but—but I do," Albion whispers. "It's not your fault, just stop, it's fine—" He says that again, he should, "It's fine, it's fine…"

Wart nods. "Just…just stop," he repeats, just as quietly. When the words leave him he hangs his head, as if he could be looking down at himself, but his eyes are closed.

Albion presses his wrists up against Wart's hands, and he lets go; when he tries to lift his legs out from under Wart's knees, Wart takes a breath, and then crouches back on his heels. His erection is still flushed and heavy-looking, and Albion averts his eyes, turning onto his side in the straw.

"I—" Wart starts, and Albion can't feel him looking at all. "I'll go…do something about this."

Albion tells him, as confidently as he can, "All right."

Before Wart gets up, he slips on the blankets; Albion feels them lift, and then drop over his body, up to the chin. Wart goes several steps away, out of the light but not out of the room. He makes low sounds, laden with unsteady, irregular breaths. If Albion squints—and he does, through the dark, and only once—he can see Wart's shoulders, one braced against the far wall, the other rising and falling, the arm taut against his body.

When Wart comes back, Albion's face is to the mattress, and the straw is poking through, jabbing him in the cheek. Wart lays beside him, atop the blanket, not under it. He smells faintly of salt and sweat, much more than usual.

"I know it's—I know it's going to happen again, so…so should we stop kissing?" he asks.

Albion's just as uncertain. "I like kissing you," he says, and it's true, so he makes it sound as true as he can. "And I like that you want me, even like that, but—"

"But you're a Nation," Wart finishes for him.

He's wrong. "No. I'm a child."

Wart blinks. "And I'm not?"

-

As usual, the moot begins with Emrys calling Wythr daft.

"No, no, brother, hear me," Wythr says, and holds back those of his men who would have been content to throttle Emrys right there. "I agree with you that we might draw them south. It's Britannia the Saxons want, not the parts of the Isle that aren't. Or at least not now, not if they have any sense."

"You're assuming that the Saxons have sense."

"Well, so are you."

"No, I'm assuming that their greed is greater than it. They are here. They will continue to push west now that they have seen they can beat us, and they know that it will be easier if they crush us now. If we draw them south, we draw them only as southerly as we must, that should they crush us we at least have an avenue of retreat."

"And I say that _should they crush us_ are the words of a coward."

It's Emrys' turn to hold back the angriest of his men; unlike Wythr, he does it with merely a gesture of dismissal. "Brother, you do ill to call me a coward in my own keep."

Wythr smiles and puts hip his palms. "Sorry, _Ambrosius_, I guess since I was here while you were out being Roman I forgot it was yours."

"Be that memory of yours as it may," Emrys says through visibly grit teeth, "it _is_ mine, and you are a guest, and if the bonds of our fraternity do not stay me from throwing you out, then only those of patriotism will suffice. We would do well to at least defend the same country."

After a smirk up at Cymry, over his shoulder again, Wythr turns back to Emrys and nods. "I can be persuaded. But I think you've forgotten that there's more than one country on this Isle."

Emrys' eyes are raised, and somewhat darkly, surrounded by the shadows of his senior commanders, all seething. He sits straight on his chair, and does not rise from it. "However many Nations, the Germania sees no borders."

Albion takes a sidelong step nearer, and puts his hand on Emrys' shoulder.

On the table between him and his brother, Emrys overturns his map and weights it at the corners with three stones and an empty tankard. Albion's uncertain picture unfurls, and Cymry marked clearer to the west, Caledonii beyond the wall in the north. The roads Rome built through him are marked in solid red (Albion shivers) and the fortifications, both his and Rome's, are green. Emrys removes an arrow from his quiver, and holds it like a quill, to point, scratching through the vellum. "All this land is theirs," he starts, circling through Albion's eastern provinces, as far in as Ratae and Venonis and Claustenum. "The Ermine road is as good as lost, but for your forces at the wall; they are advancing on Fosse and Portway. You say we should go father south, and defend Durnovaria? Surely you see the risk, if we make to take that, and they take Lindinis first. We have no escape then but Cornwall or the sea, and we _all_ know how welcome you are at Cornwall."

Men on both sides laugh at that; the boys do not. Most of them are too young to understand the historicity of that joke, and in Albion's case he understands too well.

When Wythr is done laughing, he answers, "But they're expecting to meet us at Lindinis, aren't they? We'll overshoot them south, and head them off before they get to us."

"And if we fail?"

"Must you always consider that we might? That doesn't make for good fighting."

"No, but it makes for soldiers who sell their lives rather than throw them away."

Again, Wythr has to restrain his men. Even those who do not protest glower at Emrys. Cymry seems to be the only one on Wythr's side without anger, and he, at least to Albion's eyes, looks thoroughly _bored_.

"Now you _hear me,_ brother," Wythr is snarling, "I may be less a king than you, but I'm just as much a leader of men. And this may be your house, but these men here are just as many my people, and I can tell you that any implication that their friends lost their lives under my command and didn't make the Scots pay _dearly_ is like to get you killed."

Emrys closes his eyes, sets the arrow on the table, and then opens them, even calmer than Cymry. "And _I_ could tell you to let them loose and prove it, brother, but I place a price on my life that I don't expect you want to pay."

 

_Albion dreams of Rome:_

It is a scenario he knows well, worn through with familiarity; they bathe together in the river that flows through Londinium, and the skies are grey and swollen with recent warm rain. Albion polishes Rome as he would armour, with sand and a tattered cloth, and he stands on a slippery rock to reach Rome's neck and shoulders.

Rome hums, low in his throat. It could be praise at first, but at some point it slips into murmured song, deep and out of tune.

"Oh, I had a lady in Thrace," (the song goes)  
"With more lips than the two on her face.  
She said to begin  
I should just put mine in,  
But I wasn't so sure of the place."

He asks Albion if he likes it. Albion winces and doesn't answer. So Rome keeps singing, louder and clearer.

"Then after, the girl from the Nile;  
We fought about that for a while.  
But right at the end,  
She learned how to bend,  
And she took it like that with a smile!" Rome grins, and rolls his shoulders, splashing about in the river. "Get it in deep, Britannia, right there, I can feel the knot.

"The pretty girl up by the Seine  
Could go at it again and again.  
But to my surprise,   
She averted her eyes.  
It's a good thing she's got one for pain!

"I'm trying to write another verse," Rome goes on, and reaches up to cover Albion's wet hand with his own. "You want to know who about?"

 

The hand shaking Albion awake isn't Wart's. It's much larger. He hadn't been screaming before; he almost does now, but—

"Shh!"

"—ah—Ambrosius? Sire?"

"Where is my nephew?" The king's eyes are hollowed in the dark.

"I don't know," Albion breathes. "He's not here?"

"If he were here I'd not be asking," Emrys says, and there might be a hint of a smile in the torchlight. "Doesn't he always sleep by you?"

Albion doesn't mean to stammer, "Yes, but—we've quarreled, these months." It's a better explanation than the truth.

Emrys makes a sound like _ah_, and raises the torch. "Walk with me, then. You'll know where to find him."

Albion nods his assent, and shucks off the blankets, pulls on a tunic and boots and weapons and his cloak. Once his head is through the cowl, he looks the long way up through the dark at Emrys and suggests, "He's been talking about Wythr a lot lately. Perhaps he's—gone over there?"

"Has he, now," Emrys mutters, only half a question. "It's only natural for him to want his father's attention, considering he's never had any of it."

That sounds particularly derisive. Albion is moved to ask, as he follows Emrys out past the curtain, "But has Wart been a trouble to you?"

"Nothing of the kind," Emrys admits. "He takes orders, at least, which is more than I can say for many young men like him. He knows his place."

_But his place is with me,_ Albion thinks, _so why isn't he here?_

They wind through the halls of Dinas Emrys, their heels crunching through roots and rushes on the floor. Albion finds himself briefly fascinated with the way their shadows stretch in the light of dozens of torches, flickering off the accoutrements of hundreds of men-at-arms. Albion discovers something oddly fascinating in that; when they are at war, they are terrible, but at repose the soldiers are no less beautiful than then, and there is something about how the men regard Emrys that Albion envies.

It changes, somewhat, as they near the section of the fort that Emrys has relegated to Wythr and his company from the Wall. Though the torches grow more numerous, with them the shadows are stranger, and Albion _sees_ things in them, the prickle of a rat, the curl of a cricket. He's not afraid of those, but he is somewhat wary of what he's _not_ seeing that drives them into the light, and he skitters closer to the train of Emrys' long cloak. It's a deep orange wool that Albion wishes he could match all the torches to, except for the hem, which is paled and thickened by mud where it drags on the stone.

Emrys looks down at him, when he notices that. His smile is odd; not warm, but not wry. "You've been a boy a very long time, haven't you?"

"One might say so," Albion says, still uncertain of whether he must say why—

"And will repelling Germania make you a man, or must you first be unified?"

—ah. He does not have to explain. "I think the latter."

Emrys nods, and the smile has faded when his face is again revealed to the torches. "A pity, then, that there are those who would keep you at the mercy of your brethren."

His hand is not quite offered, but Albion takes it, just as they reach the chamber that the most of Wythr's men have convened in.

Laughter swells out of the room, as if there was too much to begin with, and Albion covers his eyes as if to block it. It's a joyous sound, woven with the slapping of tables and thighs, the rustling of straw, the sloshing of ale. Wythr, not at the head of a great board but near its centre, is in the midst of a story, gesturing as he recounts it. Wart is among the men intent, though from where he sits, he probably cannot even see his father's face, let alone his eyes.

Emrys says nothing to interrupt, and the room is noisy enough that his silence is unobtrusive. He looks to Wart until Wart regards him, and then makes a motion with his hands, _come hither._ Wart's eyes shade, and then draw in on Albion's; Albion gulps, and then nods, as earnestly as he can.

No one marks it when Wart gets up from the table, save the man who eagerly swipes his portion of the bench. And it takes some time, and some doing, but Wart weaves through the crowd until he gets to the curtain—and once in the hall, kneels and addresses _Albion,_ and not the king. "Is something wrong? Did I miss a dream?"

"It's more important that you missed a different kind of visitation," Emrys says, above them both. "Your post is your post, Wart."

"Not when the watch isn't mine," Wart counters, rising—but then switches to only one knee instead, and keeps his head down. "Sire."

"And if Germania stormed this keep, and you were caught in the chaos of the wrong army?"

"It's not the wrong army." Wart sounds so guileless about it that it gives Albion pause; there's no insult meant at all. "We're fighting for the same thing, right?"

Wart is near enough Albion's level that he should be able to see the uncertainty in his Nation's eyes. If that is what just startled him, well, Albion is grateful.

Emrys puts his hand on his nephew's head, and rests it there, still. "Cai is dead, Wart. You should be by me."

"But I'm not Cai. And my father is alive," he says, with a glance back at the common room as another joke is told, heard, laughed at, and missed by the rest in the hall. "I think he should like to know me."

"You mean that you should like to know him." Emrys corrects, "and _I_ know him, and I think that he should not."

Wart closes his eyes. "You don't mean that."

"You do not tell me what I do and don't mean, Wart." Just as there was no malice in Wart's words, there is no anger in Emrys'. "If he has shown interest in you at all, it is not as a son. He has nothing to leave you; he needs no heir."

"He has this. He has his corps."

"And they follow him, and not you. They are brigands, Wart, some of them literally, and they flock to strength, not name."

"…Then you haven't made me strong, Sire?"

Emrys withdraws his hand from Wart's head. Wart looks up, follows his uncle's fingertips and the line of his arm, and Wart's eyes are earnest and sad—and older.

"If you haven't, let him try," Wart neither pleads nor commands. "Or let me try by him. I want to be—for you," he says, to Albion, to Albion _first,_ "for you both—"

"I don't want you to rule by strength," Emrys says, urgent at last. "Look at your Nation. He does not want a brute."

"He does not want a lover either."

—firelight surges behind Albion's eyes, and crickets chirrup and rats gnaw on their fellows' bones, and Albion cannot feel anything at all. He cannot see Wart still kneeling before him and Emrys, cannot see Emrys, cannot move or breathe or blink or swallow. Wythr's men laugh and carouse, and the torches on the wall flicker and fray the shadows, so many shadows, there are dragons in the shadows—

Albion can't even cry. That's the only possible reason that he isn't.

When he wakes, now, it isn't from a dream. He is staring at the wall, and Wart is gone, and the corners of Emrys' cloak are batting at Albion's sides. Emrys lifts him and coddles him, as he would a babe or a wounded soldier, and carries him back the way they came, and all Albion can think is that this is _wrong, and so is he._

-

"We will split the forces," Emrys decrees at this moot, some half a year later at least. "Take your men to Badbury Rings, brother, and be done with it; yours may march with mine as far as Aquae Sulis. My scouts report the same as yours, I do not doubt. We've no time at all."

"It's a small island," Wythr says. "We'd better cross it quickly. And if the Saxons come to you first, you can bet your best we'll cut off their retreat."

"And if they come to you?"

"Make yourself comfortable in your Roman baths," Wythr says, leering. "We'll join you there to celebrate."

Albion does not ask, _and what if they attack you both at once_, because he knows they don't dare consider it.

-

Albion is at both battles of Badon Hill.

The Saxons split their forces not because they know, but because there are so many of them that it is prudent. They split off Portway at the remains of Calleva, and from there three quarters go straight east, as Emrys predicted—and a quarter sweep toward Sorviodunum and Wythr, because they _know_ he is there. By the time Albion sees it Emrys already knows, about the greater force at least, and is fortefying the hill, deepening the earthworks that haven't been used for almost six hundred years. There's not much he can do but station his best and commission the rest to dig until the enemy arrives.

Albion is not among the best, nor is he strong enough to dig. He squires Emrys.

In the shadows between his fingers as he buckles the king's armour on, Albion can see Wythr's forces, a day's hard ride to the south. Wart is deep in the cavalry, far from his father, more concerned for him than the black row of Saxons at the edge of the forest. Wythr has his hand raised, signaling the archers, and Albion can read his lips, _aim for the horses—_

"Britannia."

—he can be here now. "Yes, sire."

"Let me win you back," Emrys says.

Once Albion has clasped the gauntlet over Emrys' wrist, he lets it down and bows his head. "I want you to try."

Emrys doesn't smile. He turns from Albion and swings up onto his horse, rises a bit to spread the orange cape beneath and behind him. He rides forward, to rally his men at the northeastern point of the hill, and leaves Albion to hide, wait, and see.

Or feel—feel, when he trips on a stone trying to find cover in the earthworks and hears arrows thrilling past the shell of his ear, not here, and there the horses are shrieking. Froth hits Albion's face and when he reaches up to wipe it away his fingers are dry.

He can't see Wart at all. He can't _hear_ Wart at all, just Wythr and the commanders, barely, over the orders that the Saxons are shouting in retaliation, there—and here. Here, now, they're close enough to really hear and really see and Emrys is bellowing at them, _mow them down, pikes ready, thin the ranks before we charge—for Britannia—_ they take up the cry, here and here alone, _for Britannia, for King Emrys, for Cymry!_

Is Cymry here?

It's too late to care. The battle is upon both hills and Albion's in both and neither, wherever it's thickest and hardest to see. Wythr's archers reload and fire another volley before the armies are too close to risk arrows. Emrys' first ranks of cavalry rush down the hillface, the sun and the kerns at their backs, glowing even after the blood sprays up on their arms.

Albion closes his eyes. It does not stop for hours, and he sees every moment, every solider with a thought to him as he falls, every sword thrust forward in his name, every Saxon horse keeling sideward to crush its rider. Men cough and horses froth, and commanders shout, and in the chaos the Nations are dizzy and ill. Albion claws at the sides of his head, the trampling's all on the inside, not the out, and when Wythr stabs the banner of the red dragon through the heart of a Saxon chief and into the hilltop, Albion does not know if he screams or cries.

A great cheer wells up through someone's ranks, but not here, not Emrys', here they are _losing_, and Albion topples onto the side to muffle the nightmares in the earth. He wants the fae, he wants Grigory, he wants his brothers and his mother and Wart, but the fae that are here are reveling in the slaughter and Grigory is dead and his brothers loath him and his mother is gone and Wart—Wart is in his father's ranks and not Albion's anymore—

War goes on longest when the armies are well-matched. Emrys' fits to the Saxons like two halves of a broken plate, clashing as if that would put them together again. The noise is terrific even after the dead outnumber the living, on either side or both; Albion feels the lives, a thousand of his own, and enough Saxons spent to kill them. He feels the blood seeping into his skin, commingling with his own.

In a searing pulse of clarity, Albion's eyes flare open, not here but in the thick of the earthworks. He is behind Emrys on his horse, clinging to his cape and the flank of the beast, ducking so that Emrys can swing his sword. The innards of two dozen or more Saxons drip and drape across his arm and the neck of the horse, and the fae have surrounded him, feeding on what he gives.

A thrown dagger passes through Albion's back, and Albion knows it will strike Emrys true. He hangs his head and sighs, and tells the fae that they ought not take this king, for he would rather find his Christ in death. They laugh, but they permit it.

Those who see Emrys fall cry out in rage—or cheer, if they are Saxon—and a third yell blasts in from the south, in the new darkness. Wythr's men bring fire, and horses and horns, and the Saxons are caught between Britons drunk on fury at the death of their king and Wythr's hounds for glory.

As Albion watches and the sun sets entirely, this Saxon horde is slaughtered to a man.

-

In the heaviness of the following dawn, Albion goes out among the dead. Some have been moved; where Emrys fell, his cape has been lashed to a spear and raised, the red dragon painted crudely in blood on its centre. Wind unfurls the wool and carries with it the cries of the unlucky living, those broken in the grass, those mad where they lay. Albion regards them in turn, and takes what they offer, be it words or entreaties or an unwarped arrow, to whet and fletch and fire anew.

Of course he sees that golden boy again, beneath him on the hill, where the dead are more Saxon than Briton. This time, though, they are both actually there to see, and Albion is the first to look.

They crouch at either end of a corpse so thoroughly trampled it could be either of theirs. Albion is prying off the dead man's boots; the Son of Gaul is salvaging the leather rings that bound its hair. Albion stiffens and stands, and it's so sudden that the Son of Gaul notices. He looks up, curious eyes over curious cheeks—and then he smiles. He offers his hand forward, the undersides of his fingernails as stained as the leather across his palm, and his pale thin eyebrow curls up, daring Albion to take it.

"Gallia!" a woman calls. The name is more a moan than a shout, coming from even further away, down by a cluster of ruined horses.

The golden boy turns and looks toward the sound of his name—or the name that Rome must have given him, at least—and scampers off. It's his mother calling, Gaul herself, and the only thing that sets her apart from the corpses that surround her is that she stands upright, turning her head on its threadbare neck as if she could see out of those hollow eyes. Gallia laughs, clambers over the fallen soldiers and embraces her about the thighs, nuzzling at her stained and tattered skirts. She totters a bit with the force of it, and sets herself down on the swollen belly of a dead horse, and Gallia nestles into her lap. He paws his cheek on her thigh, and her withered hand settles into his hair, and the flies swarming around them glint like spelt honey in the sun.

He opens his eyes, and seeks Albion's out, and asks with them, _Do you want to play too?_

 

Albion has never dreamed of being asleep, but that's what this is. He is on a mattress with straw that does not poke through, and Wart's arms are around him and beneath him. It is warm, here, as if they have just been kissing, but there are no blankets and Albion can see all the way down his body to his toes. He stretches and wriggles them against Wart's, and then turns to do the same with his nose. Albion realises that their bodies are the same length again, and it is the happiest dream he has had in a very long time—

"Britannia?"

—Wart. "Wart!" Albion turns and runs, up the hill and out of whatever magic is working through his head. He trips on the spike of someone's dented armour, scrapes his palms on the earth, but it doesn't matter at all, he doesn't mind, he's borne worse for the sake of worse men and Wart—

Wart is a man now, isn't he.

Albion slows, when he sees him. There is no shade at all this high on the hill, and Albion shields his eyes to block out some of the sun, to permit him to see more than just Wart's black silhouette. His armour is so filthy that it doesn't shine at all, and he's stained with blood higher than the caps of his boots. His ragged hair can't quite hide the hair on his cheeks, not even in shadow, but his mouth is still young, still gaping as he catches his breath.

There are bodies between them, but Albion clambers over them, to get to the clearing and stand at Wart's feet. Wart kneels to Albion's level, and puts his arms around Albion's shoulders and his face against Albion's chest.

"I was so afraid," he whispers. "Father, he—he didn't win it for you."

"But you did," Albion says, his arms too trapped to hold Wart back. "And that's enough."

-

They bury Ambrosius Aurelianus with honour, at the ring of great stones between the two battle hills. Albion's mother is also interred here, though much deeper. He tells no one this (not even Wart, well, not _yet_), so that only Cymry glares at him for thinking it. Wythr is king now, and calls himself _Bendragon_. It's taken up with a cry, all those soldiers wishing him long life as they lay his brother Emrys to glorious rest.

Albion will have no more of it.

He takes Wart by the hand, and leads him aside, far from the revels and the pain. "You're coming with me to Cornwall," he tells Wart, and hopes he can sound imperious about it, no matter how small.

Wart laughs. Even if it's deeper now, it still makes Albion ache. "Well then, I suppose I am. What's in Cornwall?"

"Some things I know about you that you don't," Albion says. "But you have to believe me before I tell them."

"I do."

Albion's heart nearly breaks to ask, "Can you prove it?"

Wart nods, and closes his eyes. He pulls up to his full height, and reaches over Albion's shoulder, palm open skyward. He whispers in a breath, and one of Albion's faeries quirks in interest, out from the fire-shadows of the great heelstone. The faerie flits through the grass, hopping to Wart in three great bounds, and reaches up to chomp on the tip of Wart's finger and hang there, flailing its rabbitish legs.

When the creature's teeth bite down, Wart grits his, wincing at the pain. "They can hear and see me now," he says, "and I them. So I can't betray you ever again." The little creature hefts itself up into Wart's palm and settles there, stroking the hurt with its ears. Wart smiles, at it, and then at Albion. "I'm at their mercy if I do."

Albion blinks back tears, and repeats, "You're coming with me to Cornwall."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Citations for Part 2:**
> 
> [Ye olde handy map.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Roads_in_Britannia.svg)
> 
> I used limericks for Rome's song for two strong reasons: one, because the form lends itself to being raunchy as all fuck, and two, because limericks are Dactylic, like a lot of ancient poetry.
> 
> [Wythr Bendragon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uther_pendragon).
> 
> [The Battle of Mons Badonicus.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mount_Badon) As the location was quite uncertain, I opted to apply two of them, proximate, to suit the story's needs.
> 
> [The location at which Albion's mother is buried.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge)


	3. Chapter 3

**Sometime around 500 A.D….**

They share a horse, because there are none small enough for Albion. It's not as if he's not ridden before, he has, and horses that were far too large, but Cornwall is three days' ride at least from the ring of stone and three days alone on the wrong horse will hurt. There's something that hurts just as much about making it four days slower going and riding in front of Wart, but the horse doesn't complain, and neither does Albion. And Wart—of course Wart doesn't.

Albion envies him. Albion envies him so much; of all the growing and grown humans he's known he's never really wanted what another one has, except the fact of being tall and strong. And Wart is those now, tall and strong and maybe not quite smart but he knows enough to be what he is, at least, and maybe that's what Albion envies, that he can't be himself yet, not without growing. Or at least that if this _is_ who Albion is, he can't be happy with it like Wart.

It's been two days from the camp already, since the internment of Emrys' bones. Albion can already feel the people stirring, getting word on the wind of Wythr as their king. When the rise and fall of the horse's hooves and the steady scenery of trees lull him enough he can hear his people whispering of how soundly the Saxons were beaten at Badon Hill, wherever they think Badon Hill is. Already the tales are spreading, and already the Saxons are stirring in their bivouacs in the east, preparing for more—

"I'm going to take her to a gallop, all right, Britannia? There's a farm ahead, I want to get there while I can still see where I'm going."

"—fine," Albion says, startled, tired, dizzy. "That's fine."

Wart slips an arm around him and holds him close, then tightens his heels on the horse to spur it on. Albion would let himself drift, but he can't, not far.

-

Tintagel is built into the cliffside, with a road of rocks and lichen to protect it from the land and a falcon's-dive at least to the sea. The castle itself is even a ways from the town and the clement plains it ostensibly protects. No wonder King Gorlois spends more time at Dimilioc than here—or, Albion reminds himself, no wonder he _spent_.

Wart stalls when he gets his first sight of the castle, a black tower against the clear night sky. He pulls up on the reins of their horse, turning sideways as it braces its hooves on the damp stone ground. "Even if you hadn't told me so, I'd have guessed there were secrets here," he tells Albion, quietly, his chin nudging atop Albion's head as he speaks. "I half-expect to find more of your friends in that castle than people like me."

"Are you expecting, asking, or hoping it?" Albion cranes up—it's hard to see Wart's face when they're sharing the horse, and in this stately dark.

"…Expecting," Wart says after considering it a while. "It's probably dangerous to ask."

Albion smiles a little, and closes his eyes. "Ride on, then."

It is slow work over the stones, and the horse totters more than once; he must be tired too, Albion thinks, it's been four days' ride from the ring of stone, or at least Albion's slept thrice for it, and Wart beside him. By the time they reach the castle gate, the moon has switched positions in the sky, behind them now instead of the castle, behaving all too much like a sun.

The porter asks their names and business; Wart answers, in kind, and they are dismounted, the horse taken to be stabled. In the front hall, all naked stone but for the rushes on the floor, they are greeted by a—a man not much older than Wart (and Albion hurts to think it, he _remembers_ otherwise), with a clean-shaven face and very pale hair.

"You are?"

"Arth, son of Wythr Bendragon. My father is now King in Cymry and Britannia."

The man deadpans, "Long life to the king." Albion and Wart respond the same, Wart with a bit more enthusiasm. Only then does the man seem to notice Albion, and he kneels down to look Albion in the eye and smile sweetly. "And you, young lord? Who do you serve?"

"I served his brother Emrys," Albion answers.

The man laughs. "Or did he serve you?" It's rather hard to tell if the man knows what Albion is, or is just playing along, so Albion says nothing when the man gets back to his feet. "Margh, son of Gorlois. I greet you on my father's behalf. He's left me here to mind my sister and her children."

"We've come to see the place, not the king," Albion says.

"That's for the best," Margh laughs, eyeing Wart. "When I'm here, you're welcome."

Albion tries to get Margh to acknowledge him again, standing on his toes. "That's why we're here _now_."

But all he gets from Margh is the sort of look he used to get from Eire, the one that says all he is a _chatty little dear, now won't you be quiet._ Margh turns to Wart again and asks, "So, what about our Tintagel have you come to see?"

A faerie pokes its head out from behind a near corner, the glow from its wings filling the gaps in the stone. It laughs, high and bitter—Wart looks to the sound and light, startled, but turns back to Margh with a grimace. "I—I think everything."

That gets another laugh from Margh, and a rather horsey laugh at that, very like his name. "You'll see it better by the light of day," he says. "Where have you come from?"

Albion answers "Solsbury" at the same time Wart says "Badbury". They look at each other, and laugh as well, before Wart goes on, "The battle was won on two fronts."

"Won? Against the Saxons?" Margh nods approvingly. "Well, that's very like Wythr. I'll send my sister for some wine, and you can tell me all about it!" But then he looks to Albion—Albion thinks, crankily, _at last_— and says, "But _you_ should be getting to bed, little one."

"I can stay up—"

"Whether you can or not, you oughtn't, not with talk of war. You've ridden hard, come now, doesn't a proper bed sound nice?"

That faerie in the corner is saying much the same thing, and yes, it _does_ sound nice to Albion, but he's forgetting something and he knows it. "But—"

"Britannia, it's all right," Wart says, not kneeling but still lowering himself. "Go to sleep. I'm tired myself, it won't be long, and I'll be there when you wake up."

"But Wart, I—"

Wart scoops him up into his arms and puts a hand in his hair. "I'll even put you to bed," he says, and nods at Margh when Margh starts to lead them into the castle proper. The faerie from before stays where it is, and Albion glares at it over Wart's shoulder. It sputters angrily at him and bares its teeth—

—but Albion's nearly asleep by then. Nearly, he decides. But not. Not yet.

 

_Gorlois used to be sane. Albion knew him well enough, and he liked to be in Cornwall, which sometimes feels closer to the sea than the white cliffs at the Channel. Gorlois was kind about that, and knew his Nation the way most kings know their Nation, and the rooms his young wife gave to Albion at all the castles in Cornwall had just the right view, into the sun and, at Tintagel at least, down the rock-face to the sea. Even when the king was not in the same keep, Albion was welcome._

He is there again—where he was when last he saw Gorlois' wife. She and her daughters are here, at Tintagel, and Gorlois at Dimilioc, warring with the brigands. But Igerna is unconcerned, and knows her husband will prevail, and even insists that he will return to her that night, "So I won't be afraid, and neither should you, little Nation."

The girls coddle him, which he finds rather tiresome, but he's grateful all the same. They have pale hands with rough fingertips from scraping at thread and it's calming, the way the chatter of the fae is calming. The girls even laugh like the pixies do, more at than with him as they tickle him to keep him awake; Morgana is a wicked little thing, and Anna-Morgause just as bad but prettier about it, and plump little Elaine is big enough to keep Albion down. But they are three to his one and their mother finds it charming, and Albion's endured worse for a room in a castle on a stormy night.

A thunderclap startles him, and Elaine hugs him close, as if he's warmer than the blankets they're all nestled in by the fire. "But Mama, he's smaller than I! How can he be a Nation?"

"The pixies are small too, but you know not to belittle them, don't you?" That would be Morgana, who is happily putting little plaits in Albion's hair. Every time she starts a new one Albion screws up his face a little more. "He's going to get bigger someday, isn't he?"

Anna-Morgause only smiles, trying to braid the braids even thicker, pouting when her efforts are frustrated by how short Albion's hair is in comparison to her own.

"Isn't he, mama?" Morgana asks again.

"Of course he is," Igerna says, "all little boys do."

"But he's not a little boy! He's a Nation!"

"And wouldn't it be boring, to be only one thing?" Igerna slides closer on the rug, and takes Albion under the chin. "You can tell them so."

"I'm going to be the biggest Empire in the world," he says. He thinks it must look rather silly, with three little human girls giving him plaits and comfits.

It just makes them giggle and snuggle him more, and try to see how many of those little braids they can fit in his hair. "And what kind of Empire will you be?" Morgana asks him.

"A big one."

"But there's more to it than that," Igerna says, in a leading way, more like Rome than Mother. "Why do you want to be so big?"

The easy part of the answer comes out first. "So my brothers will stop telling me I'm small."

The girls squeal and giggle again, and Morgana asks, "Our brother is little. Your brothers are big?"

"What's it to you?"

She wriggles her nose at him like an angry badger and pulls his hair. And then her sisters join in on it.

Albion's never dreamt of being asleep, and he's certainly never dreamt of being sent to bed. But Igerna is very firm about that, and tells him that he should not fight with girls even if they start it, and has him tucked in under the window facing the sea and the storm.

He's never dreamt of dreaming either. But how else could he know of what happened to Igerna that night?

 

The mattress dips beneath him, enough to roll him onto his front. Albion's eyes start open, and his mouth too, it's this room, it's that night—

"Sorry," Wart says, almost fully stretched out beside him. His teeth flash sheepishly in the dark. It's not raining. "Didn't mean to wake you."

"It's all right," Albion whispers. "Is it morning?"

"Not yet—well, not sunrise, anyway. But I didn't want to stay. I promised you I'd be there when you woke up, right?" He pulls the blankets on, slides a bit closer to Albion, like he's small again. "So I couldn't stay with her."

"Oh," Albion says, and thinks, and closes his eyes again. He lifts his head off the pillow and rests it on Wart's shoulder instead. He smells like—well, salt and sweat, like he's tried to be clean, and it makes Albion feel warmer than any blanket ever could.

When he curls closer, Wart laughs, and tightens his arm as well. "You were cold?"

Albion tries to speak, but can't even hear it. He'll tell Wart again later.

-

At breakfast, there are four little boys warring over bread; little human boys, all smaller than Albion, and all of them with hair the colour of dried blood. The tallest and the second-tallest are squabbling and scuffling, the middle-one is watching the display with interest, and so the littlest (who can't be more than three years old) is the one to see Albion and point. He has rather pretty hands. It stops the others from fighting, at least.

"…Hallo," Albion says.

"Halò," a few of the boys say, and Albion thinks, _oh. Oh no, there are four of them and they're Caledonii's and—_

"Is there any left?" he tries instead, because as long as they don't think he is what he is it should be all right.

A mug falls off the table, and the boys fighting over the loaf look at it, and then each other, and then the one on top, the smaller and skinnier of the two, rips it out of his brother's hand and offers it forward. "You mean this?"

"Agravain, that's _mine!_ I'm the biggest!"

"He's bigger," the one with the bread—Agravain, Albion supposes—tells his older brother. "So he gets to decide whose it is. You said so." He scurries over to Albion and shoves the loaf—well, the three quarters of it that are left—into Albion's hands, as if it's ridden with maggots. And then he hides behind Albion and bites his thumb at his brother.

Albion looks at the bread, and then at the boys in turn. They're all looking to him; the oldest rather sourly as he gets up from the table, the third expectantly, and the youngest just small and confused. Albion even looks over his shoulder to try and see Agravain, but it's hard to tell whether he's watching Albion or his brother, and so Albion just ends up looking at the bread again.

Well, he _is_ hungry.

He takes it to the table, which the biggest boy has gotten off of now, and sits at it, putting the bread down. There's no knife, but Albion has his dagger, which is clean enough for bread, at least he supposes, and he takes it out to hem the bread into four pieces, and then breaks the largest one in two.

He looks at the biggest boy, catches his black eyes, and says, "I cut it, so you pick first."

The biggest boy nods—wisely, or almost—and wipes his nose and leans his chin onto the table to scrutinize the slices. He keeps looking at Albion like this is a trick—and, well, it is a trick, because they're _Caledonii's_ and he's scared, but more scared of letting the boys know that. But eventually the biggest boy takes one of the sections of bread and waves his brother over. "Does that mean the next-biggest goes next?"

It's not supposed to sound like a threat, is it? "Yes," Albion says. "I'll go last."

Nodding, he takes a bite of the bread and chews on it. "I'm Gawain." The next few words are a bit garbled, but he swallows the bread and repeats them. "These're my brothers, Agravain, Gaheris, and the wee one's Gareth." He indicates them in height order as they fetch bits of bread for themselves and the littlest. "Our father's the King of Orkney!" he adds with obvious pride, crumbs on his lips as he grins.

Albion gulps and tries not to let it show. If they're here, is the king here? Is Caledonii himself here? And he can't betray his name, he _wont'_, but they're going to wonder what he means by Britannia and he knows it. But there's nothing else to say, and he won't lie, so he tells them, "I'm Britannia."

His portion of bread is still on the table while the others are chewing. Gawain laughs. "You're a girl?"

"You're an ugly girl," Gaheris adds.

"I'm not a girl," Albion says, "but Britannia's what I'm called."

"It's a stupid name for a boy." Gawain's finished his bread by now, enough to ask Albion, "who's your father?"

That's an even worse question than _are you a girl_ when he doesn't want to say what he is. "I don't have one."

"You don't, or you never had?"

"I never had. Like Jesus."

"Who's Jesus?"

_Oh, right,_ Albion remembers, wincing, _Caledonii._ "A god some of the Romans have. I thought you'd know him. His mother was a virgin, and he grew up and was put on a cross and died, but came back after."

"—so he's a wight and a bastard," Agravain says, looking rather confused but somewhat more intrigued than his brothers. "There are gods like that?"

"There are in Rome," Albion says, glad the conversations' not about him anymore. He quickly nabs the last bit of bread before he has to say anything else. The redheaded boys crowd around him, so he sits at the bench, but then they keep crowding. It makes it difficult to eat.

"I thought Rome didn't have any gods," says Gawain. "That's what Pa tells us."

"No, Rome had a lot of gods, Rome just didn't like them very much." Albion chews thoughtfully. It's strange to know more than other boys—well, not strange to know it, but strange to share it. He remembers that Wart used to be as small as Gawain and tries not to think about it. "Or faeries. They had no faeries in Rome."

Gaheris gasps, and Agravain and Gawain's eyes go wide. (Little Gareth is just chewing contentedly on his bread and not really listening.) "They don't have any faeries?" Gaheris' eyebrows knot in like a little red bird, and Albion tries not to laugh. "No wonder Pa hates them!"

"He hates the Saxons worse," Agravain says. "Is that why we're at war with them?"

Albion tries not to sigh, because if he sighs they'll ask why, and he doesn't want to say he's relieved that at least they have a common enemy. "The Saxons kill faeries," Albion explains. "They killed my friend Grigory and all the faeries hate the Saxons too."

"You have friends who are faeries?" more than one of them asks, at the same time, and pretty soon what's left of Albion's bread lays forgotten on the table as he tells them all about his friends, and some of them that are at this very board and in this very castle. The boys can see them when they try to look—or at least Gawain can, it's hard to tell with the others, but they go along with almost everything their older brother says, so it's all right for now. And Albion tells them about other faeries too, about the ones that live on the white cliffs and the ones that walk at night in the Roman cities making mischief and the ones that people think are crows and ravens in the forest because they don't want to hear the real sounds and about how at this castle, at Tintagel, they leave out bowls of milk on the hillside so that the faeries don't have to come indoors—

"Mother does that too!" Agravain says. "So that must be true."

"Is your mother from here, then?"

"Mm-hm!" Agravain says, nodding enthusiastically. "She was the daughter of a king here. The prettiest daughter of a king in the world. That's why father married her and not someone from north of the wall like everyone wanted him to. He had to go all the way around the world to find the prettiest girl and make her his queen."

The stones tell Albion which sister it was.

He reaches for more bread, and picks at it. Agravain tells the story: "Mother is sad that none of us have her looks. She has pretty black hair and black eyes and shines all the time. She's not all white like uncle Margh. And she was too pretty to leave south of the wall, Pa says. When we get big, we're all going to find brides just like Mother."

"Are you, now," she says from the doorway.

The bread crumbles in Albion's lap. Agravain scrambles over the table to wrap his arms around his mother, and the other boys follow suit, even little Gareth toddling after. Albion turns around on the bench and regards her.

Anna-Morgause ruffles her sons' hair, and then smiles at Albion. "You didn't grow after all."

Albion pouts at her, even if she is as pretty as they say. "I didn't grow _yet._"

Gawain's the one to ask, "You know Britannia, Mother?"

"But of course," she says, "I knew him when I was a little girl. He'd stay at this very castle and play with me and my sisters." Her smile sparkles like polished armour. "He looked so darling with plaits in his hair."

"And I won't like it any more now that you're grown up," Albion returns, "so don't try."

"But it's nice when Mother plaits our hair," Gaheris mutters, and Anna-Morgause runs her fingers through it to oblige him.

"I didn't like it much," Albion says, "I'm sorry." He folds his hands behind his back and gives her a little bow. "Your brother mentioned that one of his sisters was here last night. I should have asked after you."

She waves her hand before settling it back atop Gaheris' head. "It's all well and good. I'm here because my husband is battling the same Saxons as you. Arth told us everything last night."

Albion shivers. He oughtn't, it's no colder.

"Boys," she says, nudging them forward, "make a courtesy to your mother's Nation, the way you did to _your_ Nation—Britannia's elder brother."

And all Albion can think as they bow, with distance across the stone floor and in their black eyes, was that they could have been his friends if they never knew.

 

_ "Brother! Brother I know you're here, come out, come out now, come out now or I'll call you what you are—"_

The stones say it for him, "Stuff it, runt, or don't you know there's a war on?"

"It's my war, of course I know it's on!" Albion stomps on the stone and hopes Caledonii can feel it in the worst parts. "I just want you to stay out of it."

"What's that? Right, the war that you're losing." Gravel rustles in the corners; he must be laughing. "Or the one that Cymry's winning. Hard to tell the difference."

"He's not winning it, I am!" There, there's the voice; Albion should stomp on it too.

"Ha, you think Wythr's your king just because he doesn't want you to be Saxony's whore? Good to know. I'll tell Orkney. He can be your king too."

"You wouldn't dare—"

"Face it, runt. You're gonna be bottoming out for another Nation just like you did for Rome. Hope your skinny arse can take it for another five hundred years—"

There. There, there's the gravel, and Albion jumps up and down on it as hard as he can, over and over, "Stop it, stop it, stop it—"

 

—and then screams when the stone rips right through the sole of his sandal and into his foot, and he hopes it's not much like a girl's scream but at this point he can't even tell.

-

Once Albion's foot is bandaged, Wart carries him pig-a-back around the keep, and Albion tells him where everything is. It does make him feel better, but not nearly enough, so he's probably not trying hard enough at it.

Of course, the rooms they're in now don't help matters. "This is where I used to play with the ladies of the house. The last time I came here, Margh was a babe in arms, and he's the only of Gorlois' sons to survive past then, so his sisters played with me." Wart laughs; Albion frowns. "Anyway, this is where. I liked the windows."

"Three daughters, yes?"

"Yes."

Wart gives a queer sort of laugh, and hefts Albion a little higher up on his back. "C'mon. There's more to see, isn't there?"

"More bedrooms that way," Albion points, "There's a tapestry in one that I like. It has unicorns. Free ones."

"Onward, then," Wart says, altogether too cheerful. _Too_ cheerful; Albion tries to make himself heavier, thinking his legs into stone. (It's not hard, his foot certainly hurts enough, not to mention his pride.) "…Britannia?"

He snuffles his head into the crook of Wart's shoulder and hides his face. Wart still has all of that clean smell from last night, even as deep as his hair, and it's much nicer than thinking about those brutes. It's much nicer than thinking at all.

"You never did say what I have to believe by coming here," Wart says, patting Albion's calf and probably smiling, but Albion won't look.

"I thought Margh told you already."

"We didn't have as much time as he thought," Wart admits. "I was pretty tired too. Once I'd eaten and drank I'd rather have slept than tell them the story, and Margh understood. We can give him the tale tonight, right? The both of us."

Albion smiles a bit; that does sound nice. "I don't like you being bigger than me."

"I know," Wart sighs. "I don't think either of us can help it, though."

That just makes Albion hold him tighter.

Wart keeps carrying him even though Albion's not giving him directions anymore; Albion can feel Wart's head swivel as he looks at the walls. "Which of these rooms has the—oh, I know where we are! When I got lost last night, this was where I wound up."

"You got lost?"

"On my way back from Anna-Morgause's rooms. That pixie from last night led me back to you. Oh—is this the tapestry you meant?"

—oh no, no, no, "No—"

"Are you sure—I mean, it has unicorns, and—"

"Wart, she's your _sister!_"

Wart doesn't shudder as much as freeze, and Albion can feel every muscle stop. The arms and back supporting him still and dry like clay, his grip tightens and chokes, everything but his voice and even that falls heavy on the air. "You're—"

"Don't—don't say I'm fibbing, Wart, you promised to believe me—you promised, and I—"

There's a bedroom near, and Wart rushes them both into it—the room with the unicorns, and the fae in the corner, and everyone's laughing at Albion for being young and tired and hateful and confused, everyone but Wart. Wart sets him down on the bed and sinks to a kneel like he's apt to be ill, his head to the mattress and his hair hiding everything. His voice is muffled on the straw. "I have to believe you."

Albion holds him and strokes his hair and beard, and says only one thing. "Your father had her mother." If Wart opens his eyes, the stones and the fae will tell him the rest. They'd been there too.

 

_And now there are pixies mocking it all in the corner, laughing and rubbing themselves together so that their wings give off cruel sparks that sizzle with the spit from their mouths. They whirl on the air and ram each other into the stone walls, their eyes rolling back in their heads. The bar of the tapestry beats in time with their kisses._

It is hard to tell if they are coupling or merely making a pantomime of it, but the effect is the same. Wart cringes against the bed, and Albion covers Wart's ears as if that could protect him. It can't; soon enough, these walls aren't the only ones battered in Tintagel, and a rattling goes up through the stone of the keep. Shrieks and growls, inside and out, then and now—the unicorns in the tapestry bray and mount the maidens sent to catch them—the rushes tangle on the floor—ash spreads on the hearth, and it all takes forms now, outlines and silhouettes and worse.

They want Wart to see. "He can, can't he?" some say between the bursts of breath they catch. "Let him see! Let him see!"

Wart is brave, Albion thinks, Wart has to be brave to be what he is. Brave, and simple, and hopeful, and eager to please. And he knows what he did, or at least enough of it to need the rest.

Albion slides his palms off Wart's ears. His nails scrape on the blankets, even this slow. He cups Wart under the chin and tries to lift his face, even if his brow is already wrinkled from the madness overhead.

"Did I betray you?" Wart's voice is nearly a whimper, and his eyes are closed, knotted shut so that prints show at the corners.

Albion can't lie, not here, so he says neither yes or no. "Do you love her?"

"I wanted her," Wart says. The fae regale him with choruses of laughter, cries that they have heard that before, in a voice the same, how fair the daughters of Cornwall, and such cuckolds her kings, cuckolds and their sons— "But I didn't know—"

"And neither did Igerna," Albion tells him. "Your father—"

Wart opens his eyes.

Every faerie in the room is King Gorlois.

 

"Your father stole his visage," Albion says. _Cymry helped him._ "Igerna thought he was her husband." He shudders to go on, and Wart to hear it, but— "Gorlois knew you weren't his, and killed her for it. I don't know how she got you to Emrys—the fae might, but—"

"I don't want to know anymore." Wart doesn't sob, not quite, but everything hitches, like the words are tapping the last of a bottle not quite empty. "Nothing. Nothing about my father, or mother, or—or Anna-Morgause, what if I—what if she—"

"She knows."

"But she didn't—she was herself, she didn't do anything, and—"

"She's married now. She's married to the king of Orkney. It means—it means my brothers are trying to hurt me and _they're_ using you, like she is, and they don't mind hurting you or they don't care because hurting you hurts me." Wart hasn't cried, but Albion can't help it now, with all the noise and the shaking and the look on Wart's face, dry cracked and ruined. "They know it now. The Nations know it. They know what you're going to be and how much I care for you, and they're trying to stop it."

Wart breathes, one hard human sound amid all the chaos of the fae, and every straw in the mattress shakes from it. Albion holds his cheeks, feels the words as they form. "Let them try."

It doesn't stop Albion crying.

"Let them try," Wart says again, louder, slower, as if it could drive all else away. He looks Albion in the eyes and the reflections of the fae make them shine with whorls and wetness. "I _know_ you. I love you. I won't let them. Not the Saxons, not your brothers, not even my father. It's as—simple, as that."

It has and hasn't happened before; the last time Albion cried for him like this, he hid it with kisses. Now, he doesn't know if he can or should. His hands shake, faltering on Wart's beard—that tremour passes to the rest of his body, until his teeth chatter and his eyes sear and the cut in his foot swells with fresh blood. Wart hushes him, and straightens out of the kneel to let Albion hold him, take him down to the mattress.

They do kiss, but it is different now, like this, like everything. The way Albion is curled, his knees are to Wart's chest, as if he could hide himself in Wart's body like a blackbird in a pie. Wart's kisses fall on Albion's cheeks and in his hair, and at the tops of his ears.

"If I have to grow up," Wart whispers, "let it be for you."

-

Margh sends them out of Cornwall with a small army. He knows as well, Albion is certain, but no one says a word about it. It's better for the kerns not to know they're an apology. The same day, over the cliffs of Tintagel, Albion can see a ship bound for the north, and four red-haired boys scampering on the deck among the sailors.

Albion will be content to never see their mother again.

-

"Who goes there, flying the unicorn?"

"The son of your king," Wart snaps at them, his rein-arm also around Albion on their horse. The rider nearest him holds the flag: _vert, a unicorn argent rampant_. "I come with an army from Cornwall and the blessing of this Nation."

"Bendragon doesn't have any sons," the headsman says, grinning wide.

"I forgive you your ignorance," Albion says, sitting higher in the saddle. (He's been practicing this. He hopes he sounds bigger.) "My lord is the son of Wythr Bendragon and Cornwall's Igerna, and his brother Margh will vouch for him, though it be his father's shame. He sends these men on Wythr's behalf, and my lord to—" (and this pause is equal parts forgetting the word and not wishing to say it) "—bolster his command."

The headsman's grin grows still wider. "Well, then! Between the Orkneys and you pixies, we'll have ourselves an _army_!"

Wart asks him, "Is the battle nigh?"

"Nigh enough you'll get no rest afore it," the headsman says. "We're marching on Londinium. Now, up the Roman road with you, make a pace of it and you'll catch the king by night."

 

_The unicorn on the standard is resting now, while other men ride. He whispers to Albion of the doings of his fellows, of the fae in the forests and the dragons beneath the fort. The red one is awake now, clawing at the white. He should have strength now, for it, for his Nation is riding him and lending his magic._

Albion asks him, over the drum of the hooves and heaved breaths, "Can they win?"

The unicorn lifts his maw, to ask if Albion could.

"With Wart, I can," he says. "Anything Wart wants, I'll do, and Wart wants to win this."

"Then I will tell the dragon through the bones of my fellow that more Nations than the one to ride him wish him to prevail."

Albion's heart skips. "—the bones of your fellow?"

"His wounds have been mended with the magic of our kind," the unicorn on the standard says. "Our blood now threads his."

Albion's hand clamps over his own mouth, to keep from gasping or retching or worse. _Cymry—he—he said it wasn't a horn anymore._

The unicorn asks him if he still wants to win.

He says he will leave it to Wart to decide whose king he is.

 

They don't reach Wythr's band that night, or the next, not even after they send their fastest riders ahead. But the Roman road, the Portway, is untroubled as they charge and march up the stones, and soon, they are privy to why.

Corpses line the paving stones, most of them Saxon; those few who are not are buried under cairns, their ghastly hands left above the earth to point the way for those who follow. The fae perch on their fingers and have at their blood, and Albion's head aches to hear them rejoicing in their new heroes. They suck the soldiers' fingers grey and white. The glow of their wings sets the skin translucent, so Albion can see the maggots spawning and coiling around their bones.

Wart can see them too, can't he? He's certainly looking. But all it does is make him ride harder, until the corpses are fresher, until the stones are still wet. Wythr is carving them a path, the men say, as if he is hacking down trees instead of men. Albion wonders if he could build a city on their bones, or if the fae are planning to do just that. He doesn't dare lend that idea voice. He thinks they would like it.

His foot is mostly healed, now, or enough at least that it does not pain him when he changes the linen, nor when Wart changes it for him. When they ride, it still aches, with the rest of his legs, perpetually hanging without stirrup or support. But Wart knows what's ahead, or thinks he does at least, and when the bodies cease to frame the street and begin to spill into it, unburied and unaccounted for, that only quickens his pace, though the hooves of the horses now contend with bone and flesh atop the stone.

-

And then comes they day they see—and hear—more wounded than dead.

"The city," coughs the one who falls, woad mixed with blood on his face, clinging to the flank of Wart's horse, "the city will be ours—"

Albion touches him, and sees the lie.

 

_Wythr makes his camp on the banks of the river, south as it flows west. The horses gorge themselves on water and grass, the men on hope and wine. Half cross it in the night under cover of drift and darkness, and the standard of the dragon is raised on the north bank as well. Londinium's walls are not nearly as tall as the one that Wythr knows; his archers have fired much farther and higher._

Albion should know, and does.

The brigands swarm up them the first light of dawn, and the Saxons don't know where to direct their arrows. Once the first wave is up and in, they uncouple the gates, and those who survive set the bridges alight. What had been a ring of stone is now a ring of fire. It's a brigand's way, Albion remembers—the land is already theirs, and will welcome them back as long as they expel all else from it. It makes Albion ill to think of, and worse still to see, through the melting eyes of all who burn in the city.

He sees, more than feels, as Wart and his band rush up the road, to the smouldering remains of the bridge. He sees the flag cant and arc, forward, and those who can swim dive in swords and all. The horses spook at the fire—oh god, was that Wythr's intent?—and Wart claps his hands over the creature's eyes, Albion knows those arms are around him—

But Saxony is in the city, though it be ablaze.

Albion sees him through Wythr's eyes now, with sword instead of bow. Rome must have seen the same—Rome must have held his own for even longer. But on the far side of the bridge, on the stone road before the wood has taken light, Saxony is terrible, his hair fanned out behind him as if to illuminate the arc of his sword. It's larger than Wythr's—he is larger than Wythr—but Wythr parries that massive blade and cuts back with a cross of his own, rending the tooled leather on Saxony's chest.

The last human that dared to duel a Nation, in Albion's memory, was Boadicea. Her bones, too, lay beneath this city.

 

Wart stares, but cannot catch his father's eyes before they flash red, then white. The sword of Saxony takes Wythr in the chest—not just in, _through_ it, through muscle and bone and the half of his heart that still beats—and Germania's brutish strength pins the sword, and Wythr's body with it, to the cracked and chapped stone of the streets of Londinium.

The flames of the bridge lap up around Germania's shins. He looks through them, at Wart, and then at Albion. His eyes burn with the same unmitigating intensity. He makes to pry his sword from Wythr's body, and grits his teeth to try. The sword does not budge; perhaps the flames have swollen the blade in the earth. With a dismissive scoff, Germania wrings his hand out, the heat of the hilt too much even through his glove, and commands, for Albion's ears alone:

_ "Die of his wounds."_

-

A day and a night later, the city has cooled, that Wart and the survivors may walk among it. The Saxons have lost this fight—but the Britons have lost their king, brigand though he was, and that is what Rome used to call a Pyrrhic victory.

Albion cannot help but think of Rome, however much he wishes it would stop.

By the time Wart has come upon his father's body, whole but for the sword protruding from his breast, he is not the only one to gather beside it. There are men from all the armies that had convened on Wythr's march; men from the deepest reaches of Cymry's place, and from north beyond the walls. Lot is here, and Albion knows him on sight—he tugs the edge of Wart's tunic, and when he has Wart's attention, gives the king of Orkney a sidelong glance so that Wart will know, _you cuckolded this man._ Wart stiffens, but says nothing, and approaches the throng.

They are, one at a time, trying to wrest the sword from Wythr's body. They've stepped on him to brace for it, and no matter how they defile the corpse, the blade holds fast in the stone. Albion is holding Wart's hand when it starts to shake with fury; he almost holds Wart back, once he sees it, from lashing out, but Albion's not strong enough to—

"You blackguards!" Wart wrings himself out of Albion's grip and charges forward, dispersing the crowd. He shoves the latest contender for the sword off and knocks him down, and of course, they all exclaim, they all protest. "My father lies there!"

"And ever there he'll lay there if we don't get that out of him," at least one man says, or something like it, but Wart's already gone and wrapped his hands around the hilt.

He stands astride what remains of his father's body, and looks to Albion. He is crying—they both are, Wart with rage and Albion with hope, but neither with strain. The sword slides out of the earth, as if it had never been jammed in at all. Wythr's body slips back off it, and the crowd is so silent that the thud of it echoes through all of Londinium.

Wart leans on the sword, as it is rather large for him. He turns to the man he knocked down, and offers him a hand. "Sorry," he says, "did you want this?"

The man rises, but only to kneel like everyone else, Albion included.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Citations for Part 3**
> 
> [Ye Old Map](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Roads_in_Britannia.svg).
> 
> [Tintagel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RemainsofTintagel.jpg). More [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintagel_Castle).
> 
> [Margh of Kernow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_Cornwall). I am an opera nerd; yes, his wife will bear a mention in later parts of the story.
> 
> [His](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgause) [three](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_le_Fay) [sisters,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_\(legend\)) [their mother](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igraine), and [father](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorlois).
> 
> [Lot of Orkney](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lot), and [a certain relevant son.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawain) Did I mention I'm an opera nerd?


	4. Chapter 4

**Sometime _after_ 500 A.D….**

Today, Cymry brings King Arthyr his bride.

She's Cymry's no matter what Albion says (and Albion's said a lot about it but no one listens), because that is what Wart wants, never mind what Albion wants. Albion wants Wart for himself, even if he has to get married, so Wart should marry one of Albion's people. But he wants a bride from Cymry and he won't say why where anyone else can hear and since Wart is king now _everyone_ else can hear.

Wart and the armies retook all of Mercia but Londinuim's too far south, too close to Dubris and the channel, and there are still Saxons marching on Watling's road. So they've set the keep in Camulodunum, where the Roman walls still stand, and if Albion thinks that's no better, well, no one listens. It's a filthy town with, with Rome's footprints everywhere and Rome's coins scattered on the ground. It's the first one he put his soldiers in to stay. No one listens when Albion says that either. They only care that the walls are strong, never mind who built them.

And never mind that Wart's precious bride has to cross all of the island, and even if Cymry's bearing her she's not a Nation, she can't cross it to Wart like Albion did.

Albion wonders if Wart knows that too. Or if he believes it anymore.

Because nobody _sees_ Albion here. When Wart's not with the army or in the room with his generals (where Albion sneaks, sometimes, or thinks he has to sneak even though Wart does say that's all right, after), he has a long room in the keep where he listens to people who come to speak to him, because he's King and he's held off the Saxons for ten more winters than his father.

Albion used to hide behind the biggest chair. He doesn't have to. They're all looking at Wart anyway.

-

"I've set up a room for you that faces the sea," Wart says, when Albion is squiring him into his best clothes. "Like at Cornwall. You liked that, right?"

Albion's fingers slip on the laces of the left greave, and he opens his mouth to ask why, but Wart gets there first.

"It's close to here," he says, "Two doors down. Northerly." He stretches his leg, so Albion can tie it tighter. "With a standard on the wall. The one from this room. Didn't you notice it was missing?"

"No," Albion says.

Wart grimaces, and not at the lacing. "Oh. Sorry. But I did, it's there. And a bed all your own—"

"Why?"

Wart's calf shivers, and Albion doesn't touch it. "What do you mean, why?"

"Why do I need a room of my own?"

Wart's breath hangs on the air, and then lets out all at once; he turns, and kneels on the shin that's not covered with a greave yet. Like this, he'd have to look up at Albion if Albion was standing, but he's not, he's kneeling too, so it's just a different kind of looking down.

"I mean," Albion starts, and his breath's not coming in or out right either, "I mean I know what you're going to do when you marry her, and you should probably do it in a bed, but I just won't sleep here tonight if you need to be alone with her. I'll just sleep outside or something, or in the kitchens, or with the guards, or—and, and then after that—after that can I come back?"

This close, Albion can hear the sound Wart's lips make when they part, and the sound his eyes make when they close. Albion puts his hands on Wart's cheeks—his beard is much thicker now, and since he's all clean for the wedding it's almost the same dense golden colour as his hair, and his hair is long enough now that the curling parts tangle with the beard parts when Albion tangles his fingers through them. He keeps Wart's face tilted toward him, even if Wart isn't looking right now. Wart _should_ look, Albion _wants_ him to look, Albion just wants him—

He pushes his palms in so that Wart's lips gather into a kissing shape, and leans up before he loses his nerve.

The way Wart kisses has changed, Albion thinks—that's okay, so has Albion's way. It's slower, sadder, more urgent, less about how it feels than what it's trying to say. And Albion is trying to say _you said you couldn't betray me, you haven't but you will_ this way, with the tautness of his lips and the pressure of his tongue, because he can't say it aloud. He anchors his hands in Wart's beard and lifts up on his knees as high as he can, he can be taller this way—he can show Wart that too, he can be grown-up enough to kiss again. He says all these things with his body, or tries to at least, but Wart knows how to listen even if he sometimes doesn't hear, Wart knows what all of this means, Wart knows his Britannia, his _Albion—_

—and he probably knows what jealousy tastes like too.

That explains why Wart's kissing differently. It's because he's not kissing back.

So Albion pulls away, but doesn't let go, and doesn't let himself cry either. He wants to. He wants a lot of things.

He can't have any of them.

"Are you sure that's what you want?" Wart asks him. His eyes are still closed, and his cheeks dip and swell when he says this, shifting under Albion's palms. "If you're sure, I _can_, but—but Britannia, I don't think you do, or I'm afraid that you don't, or—"

"You can't tell me what I don't want," Albion shouts, even though they're this close. "I don't care if you're king now, you can't tell me what I don't want!"

"Britannia—"

"I don't want her!" He yanks on Wart's beard, hard. "I don't even know her and I don't want her! You don't need a queen. Emrys didn't have a queen. So you don't need a queen! And—and I can be with you. So there. That's enough, isn't it? That's always been enough."

"No it hasn't," Wart says.

It echoes.

"I do want you. And I want to protect you, and help you, and make you happy. That's why I'm getting married."

"But she's not a Briton!"

"But if I married a Briton, all the others would be unhappy—"

"So you'd rather make them _all_ unhappy?" It's harder and harder to hold the tears back now, but Albion's so angry and that's an excuse, they're not weak tears, they're hot tears and that's better than being hurt. "They're not going to want her any more than I do!"

"Britannia, I _can't_ take a queen from your people."

"Why not!" His lips are chapped and the salt is stinging them. "If it can't be me, the at least—"

"She—" Wart gulps. Albion can feel it in his fingertips. "She could be like Anna-Morgause," he says softly, as if he doesn't want even the fae to hear. "I…I have to wed someone whose mother my father could never have touched."

Albion's not sure whether he's the one to start shaking first. Either way, the tremour passes through Albion's hands and up his arms, against Wart's jaw so that his teeth chatter. His eyes are open now, slick and glassy, and when they find Albion's he doesn't feel so bad about crying anymore.

Wart murmurs, "Britannia," and lowers his head, but Albion doesn't kiss him now. He cranes his neck so that Wart's brow rests against Albion's shoulder, his arms rounding Albion's back and pulling him close. "It's not to hurt you."

"But it does," Albion says, because what he's thinking—_Rome said the same_—is even worse to lend voice.

 

_Cymry rides his dragon here. In the twilight when they arrive, Y Ddraig Goch's scales are as red as the sun, with underskin of gold like the wheat its rays fall upon. He wheels around the city twice before settling with a great steaming hulk just outside the walls, and even this far off Albion can see the great white gash in his belly, glistening with cold blue veins like marble._

Once they've landed, Albion scuttles through the gates to meet them. The wedding party and army is a ways behind, he sees, up the road like an enemy. The dragon sees him first, and turns his head to regard him. There is blue in his eyes now, in the black slit.

"Have you seen what you need to?" Cymry asks as he dismounts from the dragon's neck, barely marking Albion at all. He is well-accoutered in red and green, which make his eyes stand brighter and his pale hair gleam like a halo. He looks older, though that could be more how he is dressed than any other truth.

Albion ignores him too, and talks to the dragon instead. "Hallo."

"Hail, little Nation," Y Ddraig Goch says. His lips are also chapped.

"You are better?"

"I am victorious." But the dragon lays down on the earth, likely tired from the flight.

Albion steps tentatively nearer, to show he is not afraid. "May I touch the wound?"

"Which?"

"The one my friend is in."

Of course the dragon knows his meaning; he stretches, so that his hind-claws coil, both off the ground as he turns up his belly. The white gash is larger than Albion, perhaps even longer than _two_ of him, and yet it takes up no space on the dragon's golden belly at all. Albion feels as if he must walk the length of the castle itself to see it.

When he is near enough to touch, the scar, even healed, is wider than Albion's palm, and probably deeper. He touches his hand to the veined white flesh, gently. The dragon's heartbeat is slow, and distant, where its own blood does not flow. In fact, the skin there is cold to the touch, even if the rest of the dragon is steaming, wilting the wheat.

"That beast can't hear you," Cymry says, behind him, changing out one pair of gloves for another. "He's dead."

"But he's part of you now," Albion snaps back. "You used Grigory's horn to make Y Ddraig Goch better. So their blood is shared. They're brothers too now."

Cymry grabs Albion by the wrist and pulls him away. "It doesn't work that way."

"It does for the fae," Albion says, wrenching his arm out of Cymry's grip. He goes to the dragon again defiantly and puts his hand on the scar once more. "He'll be mine someday too."

"Or you'll be his, when he eats you."

"He won't eat me," Albion says, honestly, and rubs the dragon's belly where the scar is thinnest, to prove it. "He'll let me ride him like Grigory did, and I'll see the whole world from his back."

Cymry doesn't laugh at him—he never laughs, not like Caledonii does. But he scoffs, and he sighs, and he says, "Keep dreaming," as if that's a bad thing to do.

 

Of course they're going to make a big show of the wedding. The bride came such a long way, after all. Now that night has fallen, the people have pitched torches and canopies to cover the food. It is not to be a Christian ceremony, and Albion's thankful for that, at least. The ground is strewn with flowers wherever someone isn't standing, but they're too mixed and too wild to have actually grown in this field, and they smell something awful. Even the fae agree.

Thousands have gathered to see her, and she brought another thousand with her in force (and a hundred of them on horses!), so it's quite a crowd. Albion stays by Wart, follows at the tails of his fur-lined cape. He talks about important things with important people before the procession begins. Albion can smell his sweat only because he knows the scent exactly.

The musicians are the ones to stop all the chatter, and soon the drums and flutes and Roman harps are louder than the voices all around. The minstrels dance as they play, trailing long sprigs and ferns, wearing bones and bells, and they clear a somewhat winding path through the revelers. When they find Wart, they circle him and isolate him from the rest—except Albion, stubbornly clutching the hem of his cape even when the flutes whistle in his ear or the drum startles behind his head. (The fae are imitating all this, and those who can fly are whirling around the musicians, creating circles within circles, spirals within spirals, and when Albion watches this he gets so dizzy that he buries his face in Wart's cape and tries to cover his ears too. It only helps a little, which is worse than not helping at all.) He misses when the bride arrives, but soon the whispers and cheers are too loud to ignore, even over the music. So he looks up, and peers around Wart's side, past the chaos of the minstrels.

The girl that Cymry is leading is no older than Albion looks.

He wants to scream. He very nearly _does_. But the music is that much louder. She's a _girl_, she's barely a dozen summers old and Wart is almost three times that, and why can _she_ be a child and wed him?

Cymry sidesteps the musicians and brings the girl into the circle. She's in a red dress that fits her well except for how long it is, which is long enough to trail behind her through the grass and flowers and hide her feet. Her hair is long too, and black, and too thick and heavy to curl, so what happens is that the parts of it that aren't braided look like a rock-face in the dark, with all the gold she's wearing in it standing out and waiting to be mined. She's pretty, Albion decides, the same way Anna-Morgause was pretty when she was small, but with better and clearer eyes. The girl's are blue like Gallia's.

She bows, and hides even more of herself in her skirts and the flowers. "I am Gwenwhyfar," she says, and Albion wonders why she's all in red if her name says she's white. Maybe it's because she's so pale. "If I please you, let us be wed."

"You do please me," Wart says, "and even if you didn't, I don't see why not." He smiles at her, and takes her with a knuckle under the chin—Albion can tell that he is shaking because all the fur in the cape is shifting, tracing patterns in itself—and bends almost double to kiss her.

Albion makes himself watch. He's not sure whether Wart is kissing her like he kisses Albion (he's not sure whether he wants to be sure) but it's not a brief kiss, and she's smiling on the other side of it or at least Wart can see her teeth—

"Runt. Let go of him and take my hand."

Albion very nearly _hisses_ at Cymry, "Never."

"Fine," Cymry says, and then crosses near and seizes Albion's wrist. He _won't_ let go of Wart's cape, and he leans even closer so that he can feel the scabbard of Wart's sword—Germania's sword—under the cloth, but if Cymry has to hold his hand somehow then _fine_, ceremony is ceremony.

The kiss stops, and the musicians pick up a slower tune as the druids come to sanctify things before the revels. They cover Wart and Gwenhwyfar in more flowers, and make them join hands, make them embrace. Gwenhwyfar's face is on level with Wart's ribs, only a little higher than Albion's. He feels Cymry's hand tighten on his wrist but he _won't_ let off the cloth, no matter how slick the fur is getting from his tears.

-

It _is_ a nice room all his own. Wart did try. The window faces the sea, and Albion's drawn the curtains back even if it's cold and raining and the mist makes the hearth flicker. He stares at the unicorn on the standard and wonders if it can't see him anymore either, but doesn't bother asking.

The bed is very big, and very empty. Albion tries to bash himself a dent in the straw all the way to the floor, so that the straw bunches up and becomes Wart-shaped beside him. It's not working very well. All he's succeeded in doing is tearing the mattress and getting straw in his hair, and getting itchy all over. He thinks it might serve him right for being so selfish but he doesn't stop, and then when the straw starts getting wet because of the open curtains it stinks. And that's too much punishment for even him.

So he sits by the window and scratches the cuts from the straw, which isn't Wart-shaped at all, and he wonders if the sky is crying or sweating. Has Wart done what Albion said he should? Does he listen to the land now? "Of course not," Albion mutters to himself, _that's what this is_, and he wraps himself in the blanket and uses that to scratch the itches instead.

It's pretty on the water, though. The waves are big enough to see and loud enough to hear. This is the sea that the faeries say there are other Nations on the far side of, ones who can see them too. Albion hasn't met them yet. He doesn't think he ever shall. The only people who want Albion now want him dead or theirs or worse, and Nations don't survive like that.

He hates this keep, and he hates this city, and he hates Caledonii and Cymry and Eire wherever she is for not helping at all. He hates that everything smells like Rome and whatever doesn't smells like Saxony, and even if he doesn't hate Saxony and Rome themselves he hates them for fighting and getting him tangled in it. And he hates most that he wants to be left alone when it's not what he really wants at all. He hates _everything_, the rain and the clouds and the little ship on the sea and the straw and Gwenhwyfar and everything—

—a ship?

_A ship._ Coming nearer to the coast, with a lantern on the hull growing brighter.

Albion scrambles off the ledge and into the room, slips on the straw—he rushes out the door and down the hall to Wart's room and bangs on the door, shouting for him. "Wart! Wart, there's a ship and it has no standard and it's coming here—Wart, Wart, open up—" No one's answering—is it like with Anna-Morgause? Is Wart sick or drunk or under a spell? Either way, Albion yells one more time, and then just opens the door and runs in.

It's a good thing he's already screaming, because otherwise seeing a naked little girl on _his_ side of the bed would make him. But she's there, curled up and concerned but not covered in the blankets, and Wart's sitting on the edge of the mattress beside her, as if he's just now gotten up. "Britannia, I heard you. Is it a dream?"

"No, it's real, there's really a ship! And it doesn't have a standard and I know it's not ours, and—"

"All right, all right—shh. Calm down." Wart smiles, and slides off the bed to get his boots and clothes and weapons. "You wouldn't be this scared if I'd have been with you, so it's okay to not be scared now. We'll get a detachment together and see who it is. Right?"

And since Albion has been shouting, the next words come out just the same. "Don't make fun of me!"

Wart, for his part, looks confused, but it isn't enough. "Who's making fun of you?"

"You are! You're—" Albion covers his mouth so he doesn't choke or cry, but the words slip out through his fingers. "You're making me less."

The boots hit the floor, and Wart steps into them. Albion can hear every crinkle of the leather, every slap they make against his shins. He comes nearer, and Albion glares up at him defiantly, hand still clasped on his mouth.

"You are," he murmurs.

Wart picks him up like a sack of grain and carries him out of the room.

He only makes it a few steps into the hall when Albion starts punching him in the back. Sometimes he hits the scabbard instead, and it hurts but he doesn't stop until Wart puts him down. "Britannia—"

"You promised to believe me!" He's not shouting as much now, but it's still loud and sad and broken and pathetic and he hates that too. "Even if it's just a dream—and it's not—it's never _just_. Not with me. You _know_ that."

This time, when Wart picks him up, it's tenderer, chest-to-chest, and although it makes Albion feel even younger than he sounds, it's closeness, and that's—that's better. "Let's get you a cloak, all right? It's cold. You're coming with me to meet the ship."

He snuffles his face into Wart's shoulder, until Wart puts him down again.

 

_Someone is shielding the ship's lantern from the rain. Its little, long-fingered hands make shadows like the clouds do to the moon. The rings around the nails glow red, as the skin is thinner there, and Albion sees every speck of grime between them, as black as the bones beneath. He can't see more than that hand at all, but beneath him is a heap of bandages, an unfurled sail, a stench of death._

The Britons gather on the shore—Albion can't hold Wart's hand here, but he can stand very close, and he does, clutching at his cloak instead. Cymry's people on the roads, Saxony in the south, Caledonii and Lot in the north—and all within—is there to be no haven, not even the sea?

 

"_Salve!_" Gallia says.

He lopes himself over the side of the boat—it really wasn't big enough to be called a ship, and there are only two people in it even if one of them is a Nation—and runs right to Albion, splashing in the tide. His smile gets even brighter this close, and his eyes and his hair, and Albion pulls the cloak tighter around himself instinctively. This is the closest they've ever stood and now Albion can see that Gallia's almost a head taller, even if his face and voice are about the same age as Albion's, and his eyes are so clearly a Nation's. "You're Britannia, aren't you? I was right! Do you want to play? Maman didn't come with me but she said it's all right if we play together even if Papa is trying to kill you."

Albion shrinks away—he can't help it—and looks to Wart, but Wart is looking at the other person coming out of the boat. It's a young man, a human, with black hair and—well, most of his face is covered in bandages, even his eyes.

"Oh, him?" Gallia asks, trying to swivel so that his head is in Albion's line of sight. "That's Launcelot. He's my friend. He didn't want to be with the army anymore so we came here together. I think Papa will kill him too if he goes back. He already tried, look!" Gallia tries to grab Albion by the hand but only gets the cloak, though that's still enough for him to drag Albion over by. He lets go of Albion as if he never held him at all and puts his hands on the young man's face instead, rubbing the bandages. Under one of his hands, blisters burst and soak the cloth yellow. The young man cries out in pain, shaking. Gallia smiles hopefully.

"Hold there," Wart says—in Brythonic, not Latin, because this is a test. He comes nearer with some of the torch-bearers and soldiers. "You're from the Saxon army?"

Gallia looks up at Wart, and holds the young man's face even tighter. "Surely you don't want to hurt me!" he says in Latin. "Besides, you can't. And he is wounded. He just wants to fight for you. And I just want to play with Britannia—"

"Please," the young man groans from beneath the cloth on his face. "Please, kill me or keep me, but do not send me back to Saxony." The way the wrapping shifts as he speaks gives Albion chills, and he wedges himself against Wart's side, tries to use Wart's cloak too.

Wart lays his hand on the young man's shoulder. "Tell me who you are."

"My name is Galahad," he says, with phlegm through his voice, "but I am called Lende or Launcelot."

_It's his true Name,_ Albion thinks, and knows he has power now. _Galahad._

"A good thing, since I can't pronounce that last one, Lende. Come. We will mend you. Who hurt you? What rank did you hold?" He hoists Lende up out of the boat, and another soldier comes forward to support Lende's other side. Lende flinches from the touch, but probably knows it's as much a check as anything else, and since he can't see through all the bandages it's for the best.

Gallia laughs—it sounds like flutes pretending to be drums—and puts his arm around Albion just the same way, his fingertips brushing past the cowl and sliding on Albion's throat. "Come on, let's go too! Support me, Britannia!" But when they follow Wart and Lende and the soldiers it's more like he's dragging Albion along, and Albion does want to sink into the sand and bury himself in it so Gallia can never touch him again.

As few as ten steps more, and Lende pitches forward into the sand, coughing violently. Red and gold stain the bandages from the inside, and Wart's calling to the soldiers to carry the young man, get him laid out and treated, and all Albion can think is that Wart doesn't know who his enemy is.

 

They strip Lende of everything, in the keep's hall, his weapons first. Among them is a sword as heavy as Germania's, but because it is thicker, not longer. It is wrapped in hide the way Lende's face is wrapped in cloth. Once it's set down against the corner, Gallia abandons Albion and goes to unwind it, stroking his fingers on the gaps in the hide, rubbing them on the edge.

Wart asks him again, "Who were you, to Saxony?"

"No more than cavalry," Lende says, "my father sent me from Benoic." He adds, with a rattling sigh, "A bastard," and peels the sodden cloth from his face.

Or, rather, from what remains of it.

Albion doesn't shrink away—he's seen worse and more recent. But _because_ he doesn't flinch he can see all of it, the curve of every bubbling blister, the ones that the press of Gallia's hand ruptured. The burns are in crude crossed streaks, plainly not a single accident, nor self-inflicted, and they cover all from the missing peak in his hairline to the curve of his neck. About a quarter of his face is still whole around his right eye, enough to guess his age by if his body won't tell. There had been hair on his cheeks before the burns crossed them, but not enough to cling.

Just because Albion doesn't look away doesn't speak for the others. In fact, the only ones who seem not to shy from it are he, Wart, and Gallia.

Wart gulps and tries to ignore it. "Where's Benoic?"

"Leon," he says. His mouth moves very little, perhaps for fear of agitating the blisters.

"Well, that explains why you can speak our language."

"And why Saxony does not want me, sir."

"That's—recent, isn't it." Wart reaches out to indicate, but not quite touch, the burns.

Lende might be smiling. "That's the reason I left."

Gallia, with the hide from Lende's sword gathered in his arms and coddled like a toy, pads over to sit against Lende's leg and pouts up at Wart. "Papa didn't trust Launcelot," he says, earnest and sparkling, in Latin again. "He loves me too much. Launcelot, I mean."

"I served my people the best I could," Lende whispers, putting his hand affectionately through Gallia's hair. "And I do want to be a good soldier. The best, if I can. But I can't do that unless I serve a lord I believe in, and that lord is not in Saxony."

Albion feels distinctly ill, and Lende's face is not to blame for it. He asks, "Are you a Christian?"

"Yes."

"I don't think that lord is in Britannia either."

This marks the first time that Albion has seen Gallia frown. It makes him much less beautiful, but oh, does it make Albion feel triumphant.

"Of course he is," Wart says, dismissively, and all the vindictive _good_ Albion just felt in his bones is stripped away. "When you've recovered, do you think you could lend yourself in defense of this Nation and his people?"

Albion hopes, against hope, that Lende will say _no_, and let them burn the rest of his body and send smiling, perfect Gallia away for good—

"Sire?"

In front of the Nations—and behind the men—Gwenhwyfar's standing with a torch and a cloak, still breathing heavily (she must have run down the hall) and red in the cheeks. Wart turns to regard her with a smile and an explanation; Lende just turns to regard her at all, and it's Lende she's looking at.

She drops the torch and screams.

Some of the straw on the floor catches fire. Since Wart's run after _his wife_ to calm her down, that leaves Lende and the Nations to put it out with their cloaks. Albion grabs the hide out of Gallia's hands—why is he just standing there?—and throws it over the straw to stamp on it. "Come on, you sod, help out—"

"Why is she scared?"

—Albion trips and almost falls in top of the fire. Gallia somehow sounds even more beautiful when he's about to cry.

He puts a hand on Albion's shoulder. It's trembling. "Britannia, why is she scared?"

Albion swats it off. "Because Lende's ugly," he says, digging his foot in to the hide and scraping it on the floor. Lende's doing the same thing on the other side of the cloaks and now that it's dark again Albion can only see Lende's eyes. They're gold, like the straw and Wart's hair, eyes aren't _supposed_ to be like that.

"No—no, he's not!" Gallia shouts, and kicks Albion in the seat.

Albion falls forward, right into Lende's front—Lende catches him, but Gallia's _jumped_ on him now, pounced on his back and grabbed onto his hair, and since Lende's still holding onto him and wondering what to do with him Albion can't throw them off—

"He's not!" Gallia's holding so—so tightly— "He's not, he's the most beautiful person in the world except Maman, you take that back Britannia, take it _back_," —so tightly on Albion's _neck_, and when Lende finally lets go of his front Albion can barely even lift his arms to fight. But he does, he gets an elbow back, doesn't know what part of Gallia he hits but he definitely hit it hard enough, and he squirms out of the hold enough to turn around and hit him again and again and again—

-

Even after all the burns on his face have healed—Albion counts the seasons, and it takes more than there are in a year—Lende's still a tattered mess. He goes about Camulodunum with it covered most of the time, his cowl up and more cloth over his mouth, but when he's in the field he can't hide beneath anything more than his helmet. The helmet's beautiful, more metal than leather, and even though Lende says his uncle built it, Gallia's the one that carved all the shapes in.

"See? See, I'm almost done with the moon part," he tells Albion, trapping him in a corner of the armoury when his chores are almost done. He thrusts the helmet into Albion's face. "And these parts next to it are going to be stars of course, and under them flowers, and under them the field where he's kneeling to the queen—"

"I _know_," Albion snaps, trying to push past, "and I don't care, and if you don't stop I'll smear my hands all over it, so let me pass." He's done staining all the new leather for straps and belts, and his own hands will probably be black for a week.

Gallia doesn't move, though. "It's not my fault you don't know what's pretty."

"Yes, I do." He elbows Gallia out of the way and goes over to the bucket of water he dragged in earlier so he doesn't stain anything else at the keep.

But then Gallia touches his shoulder before he can wet his hands. "No, you don't."

"You can't tell me what I do and don't know."

"If you knew what's pretty, you wouldn't think Lende's ugly—"

"He _is_, you toad, he looks like a leper—"

"—and you wouldn't think you're ugly either."

Albion's hands hover above the water. They're shaking so much that the stain is dripping off and leaving blotches on the surface, rippling as they sink. Now Gallia has him by both shoulders, and he can probably feel that, but—but Albion can't move, it's awful.

"You aren't, you know," he says. He's slid his hands down from holding Albion's shoulders to actually embracing him, like Wart used to, and the fit is almost the same, enough that Albion almost settles into it. Almost. There's still stain dripping off his hands, and he can feel the water rustling. "Even if you have bugs on your forehead."

"Do not."

"Do so. But they're not ugly. I only love things that are beautiful. So you must be beautiful. That's why I want to play with you. You're pretty and you make funny sounds and you think funny things, and you talk to people who aren't there." He's speaking right into Albion's ear like the fae do, and Albion shivers. It tickles. It's like _Rome_. "So I want to play with you like this, because it's going to be different after Papa kills you and I want to play with you both ways."

Albion turns around and hits him in the face. His knuckles leave a black mark from all the stain. It's not the only mark he leaves—he hits Gallia a _lot_, more times than Gallia hits him today—but it's the biggest one, the most important one, and when the master-at-arms and some soldiers pry them apart, Albion can't stop looking at it and Gallia can't stop touching it.

 

_He's dreamt of sleeping, and dreamt of being made to, but now he dreams—and it is a dream—of lying there awake. He knows it is a dream, because Wart is beside him, and Wart has not stayed with him since Gwenhwyfar came. And they're alone—not even the fae are about, and the unicorn in the standard is still and asleep. Wart isn't any smaller or younger, but his beard is strangely soft against Albion's brow, and Albion holds him tightly, fastens himself to Wart's bare chest._

"What do you dream?" Wart asks, even if Albion is dreaming already.

Albion thinks a moment—outside himself, he can see how close they are, how the blankets seem to cover only one person. "I dream that we're like this," Albion says, "only the same size."

Wart laughs, just short gentle breaths against Albion's scalp. "You'd have to grow up very fast for that to happen."

"Or you'd have to be small again," Albion corrects. "That's what I dream the most. It's because I don't know what I'll look like when I'm big, but I can remember what you looked like when you were small."

"Ha, sometimes I forget that."

"It's not that different," Albion says, and in the dream he closes his eyes, to conjure the image to himself. "You were always skinny, and if you had straw in your hair I couldn't tell the difference, and I could see your mouth even when you didn't smile."

"So the last is the only part that's different," Wart mutters, and Albion thinks he might be smiling, but his eyes are closed in the dream, so he can't know.

"It's not just that. You…you weren't a different person, and I know that it's because you're grown now and I'm not, but you loved me differently."

"No I didn't."

"Yes you did. You—wanted me, and shared things with me, and it was about more than just helping me grow up, you wanted me to grow up _with_ you, not because of you. And I knew it. I still know it, and I know that it's not true anymore, or that other things are truer than it." He holds on tighter, it feels so much sparer under his arms. Is the dream over? "How much of what you love now is what's actually here? How much is what I am? How much is what I'm not, yet?"

Wart's hand comes up to hold the base of Albion's skull. Albion nestles closer—why is Wart's chest so smooth and small?

He says, "It's who you are, Britannia, all of it," and Albion opens his eyes, hoists himself up on his hands.

Wart grins up at him through a gap in his teeth, and his lips have no beard to interfere with it. His hair is no shorter, but it frames a smaller face, and the shoulders it fans out against are bony and naked and thin. Even his eyes have followed this—this is a Wart who never saw his father die, or his uncle, or even his cousin Cai—this is a Wart who wants nothing more than to be what he is and do as he wants and know and love his Nation.

Albion's throat is parched, and his breath isn't working at all. He forms words, and even in the dream he doesn't know what they are. All he knows is that they lead to Wart laughing, and pulling him down again, not to kiss but just to hold. Albion wraps himself around Wart as if his body is a trap, fastens on with every joint, fingers and ankles and neck and knees. But Wart doesn't seem to mind it, because he's doing the same, twining himself through every knot in Albion's body, so that even the parts of them that aren't touching feel like they're both there. Wart says something too, but Albion can't hear it either, and soon they are kissing whether they meant to or not, wonderful hungry kisses that don't fill them up but don't stop trying either. They roll about, and it's not a mattress anymore, it's not even straw, it's a field of tall grass and the bank of a river, and as they scuffle Wart's trapped with his back to it again, so Albion really is surrounding him. He laughs, and Albion takes the sound into his mouth and thinks he might be crying, but Wart kisses those parts too, Albion's cheeks and neck and shoulders when the tears drip down that far.

"You can look at me, you know," Wart says, "I won't go away." He pulls back enough that Albion can—that brings their hips together, and there's heat there, so Albion's eyes open as much at the shock as the suggestion.

He hears the sound of the river before he sees it. It's running through Wart's eyes, behind them, everything white and black and grey washed blue. They're glassed over, Albion thinks, and he sees himself in them—

—older and stronger. Like Rome.

 

He wakes up _screaming_.

His face had been to the straw and it muffled nothing, nothing at all, it's still so loud in his own ears, and opening his eyes doesn't stop it, and closing them's even worse—and there's no one to hold in this bed, no one at all, even the straw is just caving under him and the blankets are spitting him out. He falls onto the stone floor, and if he hits something he doesn't feel it, doesn't care. He's already hurt. He's already crying. The tears don't allay the burning behind his eyes.

He scrambles, half on his knees, for the door, and is barely standing when he gets to it and slams it open. The watch in the hall this time of night try to touch him, but he won't have it, he swats them off and tears down the hall, past every faerie who asks or laughs, farther than Wart's room, away and down, down and out the gates and to the sea. He doesn't even get that far—he trips, falls onto his hands and knees at the shore. The waves lap against his wrists and knees and hips, and slowly, all the parts that are burning and angry ebb away.

After two deep breaths, he is violently sick, but nothing comes out.

It's raining. It always seems to, these days, but this is just a heavy mist as if the clouds have come down to earth and wrapped themselves around. It makes the water colder but denser, so thick that Albion thinks he could lift it in his hands and none would trickle out. He tries, and uses it to splash the sweat from his face. His palms and fingers are still black from all the leather stain, and bruised under that from hitting Gallia, so the salt stings and leaves chalk streaks in his skin. He wonders if Gallia would think that's pretty too.

For an hour at least, he kneels there, calming himself in the sand. The air is as thick as the water, so no wonder he feels more like he's drinking it than breathing it. But it works, after a time, and the sun hasn't made any attempt to rise by the time he feels well enough to return to the keep. He lets his eyes refocus, stares at the stone, counts all the windows and towers.

His room is not the only one with a window that faces the sea.

He stops in the sand, and looks up to where the shadows are, higher than the clouds, and his are the eyes of a Nation.

The gold bands in a girl's black hair catch the sunlight as it appears. She sits shifting in the lap of a man whose eyes shine the same way, even if nothing else of his face is pleasant to look at. She holds him. She rides him. She cups his hideous cheeks and kisses him.

Albion does not know which feeling is worse, the hatred, the fear, the envy—or the relief, that Wart can still be his instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Citations for Part 4**
> 
> [Camulodunum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camulodunum).
> 
> [Gwenhwyfar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guenever).
> 
> [Lende](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Lancelot), and [where Lende is from.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany)
> 
> Figuring out how to render Lancelot's name was more than a bit difficult. He doesn't appear in most early accounts of the legend—he was [added by this French guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chevalier_de_la_Charette), so he doesn't have a Brythonic equivalent—and then when I found out that the name was supposed to be _Lanzo_ I thought, well, fuck it, I'll go with both his proper name (Galahad), and the name that Lancelot was most likely derived from. See, -el and –ot are old French suffixes, meant to turn nouns into masculine adjectives, and Lanzo comes from _Lend_—which means _health_. Hail, irony, thou heav'n-borne maid.


	5. Chapter 5

**Sometime _after_ 500 A.D….**

Medraut arrives the day that Albion throws Gallia off the white cliffs.

He didn't mean to at first, but he kept on thinking about it all through the battle, since he really didn't know what side Gallia was on, but he was _sure_ it wasn't Wart's, and that was more important than anything else. And then Gallia started talking about the ships, that they weren't going to be enough to bear all of the Saxons away, and so Albion said that well then it's probably a good thing that Wart and Lende and Belnor and everyone are going to kill them all anyway, and then Gallia got angry enough to hit Albion first. But Albion hitting Gallia or Gallia hitting Albion is never something that happens just once, and so they just kept on hitting and kicking and getting closer to the cliffs.

And then Gallia said, _and my Lende's already betrayed your stupid king, and so has his stupid wife,_ and Albion knocked him down. Except down means _over_.

Gallia screams as he falls, but it takes him a while to start, probably because he doesn't know he's falling. But once he starts screaming it gets louder and louder, more frightened and certain. It probably doesn't take all that long for him to fall but Albion watches, the whole way down, so he wonders if Gallia can fly. He'd be really angry if Gallia can fly.

He misses the worst of the rocks and the ships, and falls into the water. Gallia can't fly after all.

Albion's heart feels like it's rattling at his ribs as if they're the bars of a cage and it didn't do anything wrong. He steps back from the cliff's edge and falls onto his behind in the grass. His rump hurts, he landed on a little rock, but what Gallia must be feeling—

Does he care what Gallia must be feeling?

_No,_ he thinks, and then says aloud, "No!" because Gallia said bad things about Wart even if they're true and Albion shouldn't care what Gallia feels. He wipes the blood from his split lip, and realises that his hand is probably broken. He's too angry to cry. He should tell Wart. He should go back to the army and tell Wart. They might have won by now.

He hears Rome telling him, _see boy, that's how you do it,_ and runs as far from that voice as he can.

-

It's gotten to the point where Albion doesn't know whether he should call him _Wart_ or _Sire_. No one else calls him Wart anymore anyway—if they use a first name, it's Arthyr, always Arthyr—and he's never alone enough that Albion wouldn't have to explain. So he decides not to call Wart by any name at all when he charges into the council, and just says what he knows.

"Gallia's gone," he pants more than shouts, at Wart where he's got his back turned and his eyes on everyone else, always everyone else, "Gallia's gone and my brother is coming and so is your—"

"I'm already here, runt. Still too short to see?"

The army's established outside the citadel of Dubris, and its walls are white and grey. When the senior command starts turning from Wart to Albion, he sees so clearly the flash of their helms and their beards and their hair. There's Wart, gold all through, and beside him Belnor and Bedwyr, two of his closest advisers, greying and grey but burnt red in the skin. (Lende is back at Camulodunum with the queen, never mind the rest.) But among all those who turn to Albion's call are some he'd hoped to never see again.

Caledonii's tall as a horse now, with a grin and a stance as wide. "You got yourself a fine king there, runt," he says. "Much better than his father." That makes Wart glower a bit, but the men around Caledonii laugh. Albion knows four of their faces, and they are most certainly men now, grown up just the same as Wart. But Wart is very nearly old, the gold starting to tarnish and pale, and the Orkneys' hair is still redder than Caledonii's, with Gawain's in particular is like fire, especially in how it curls to points.

"Explains how you used his strategy of waiting until the last minute," Albion says.

"It won him you."

"Go away. You're not welcome."

"Well, I know we missed the most of the battle, but there's still a war on, isn't there?"

"Gallia's gone," Albion repeats, wrinkling his nose at Caledonii and feeling awful that the Orkneys are here to see it.

"Gone but not forgotten," Caledonii says, turning to Wart with a smirk and an open gesture of his hand. "And Saxony? Hard to forget that type. Did he turn tail and run, or fight to the end? Either way you haven't seen the last of them."

Wart considers this, more intent on the Orkneys than Caledonii. (Does he even really see Nations anymore?—Albion banishes that thought and even shuts his eyes a moment, it hurts so much.)

Caledonii's smile is framed in woad, of all things, and his arms and shoulders too, spattered with just enough blood to make it look less like paint and more like part of him. "Didn't think you thought so."

"Well-met, Gawain of Orkney," Wart starts, glancing at Caledonii only once more before turning to the humans instead. "I've appreciated your father's aid in the earlier years of this campaign, and hope to appreciate yours now."

"You can bet you will," Gawain says with a bold grin and a hand to his chest. "I hate them as well as you, you can be sure."

Wart nods, and looks upon all of them in turn. "It's a pity, then, that you've arrived only at the end of our efforts to drive them from this island."

"Have you not been hearing me?" Caledonii cuts in, almost shoving Gawain out of the way to get nearer to Wart. "I said it's not over! You cannae just take the island. If they don't come back, their sons will."

"And what would Orkney do, invade their lands on my behalf?"

"And on our own," says someone who does not look like he speaks for Orkney at all.

The brothers stand aside to let this younger man through. His hair is a drab and dingy brown, like iron scraped nearly-free of rust, and his eyes are black like the much larger men who surround him. The fae laugh and tell Albion everything. They probably tell Wart too, if he's listening, but he's _not_, he's asking—

"Whose are you?"

"I am _also_ of Orkney," the young man says, his voice as thick as Caledonii's but higher, "a child of the lady Anna-Morgause, and these are my kind brothers."

Wart's cheeks are chalk-white.

The young man kneels before Wart, and even looks at the ground for the most of it, darting only one glance to his hand where it rests on the hilt of his sword. "But you do not know me as you know my brothers. Medraut. Your servant."

_Your son,_ the fae remind him, and Albion, and all others who might know.

 

_Beneath Dinas Emrys—which has another name now—the red dragon is feasting on the entrails of the white. It's a long process, and wretched one, and Albion is glad that he's only here in dreams. Y Ddraig Goch has cleaned the bones of only a quarter of his defeated foe, and scattered the scales to make a new bed, a blanket over the gold of the hoard. The white dragon's blood has long ago ceased to leak, and only its stench remains._

Albion asks him, "Will it ever be done?"

"What, feeding? I suppose the meat will run out. But that is not what you are asking, little Nation."

"And to what I am asking, then?"

"No. None of what you ask of has an end. Your want can only grow. Your pain can only grow. You can only grow to accommodate them."

Albion closes his eyes, and listens to the dragon eating. "But I can't make any of them grow, can I? If I could I would have, long ago! I'd have gotten big enough to stop my brothers and Rome."

"You were smaller before them, were you not?" When Albion opens his eyes, the one of the dragon's is on him, as large as Albion is tall. Well, the dragon's grown at least. "You grew under Rome's care."

"It wasn't care," Albion says.

"Tutelage, then," the dragon says with what might be a smile. His teeth are as large as Albion too. "But you did grow."

"And no more since."

"It is so hard to tell, with Nations," the dragon agrees. "They live as we do, and see ever the same face in the river, unless there is a new scar."

"But I do have scars," Albion says, "and they all take up the same amount of skin."

The dragon considers this, settling his jaw and tilting his head just slightly to the side. "I did not grow when the white dragon rent me," he says. "And I did not grow as the wound healed over."

"But you did grow," Albion says, "I can see that—"

"When I ate his heart."

 

It's so dark that Albion wonders if he's still sleeping. But no—no, after a moment the scent in the air is so plainly that of straw, not iron, and there are no dragons here. There's no one here at all but Albion, and he isn't crying, isn't screaming, isn't bursting from the dream. He lies awake, itching at the blankets, staring at a ceiling he cannot see.

If Wart were here, would he ask? If he'd ask, Albion would tell him, everything, to the letter, to the littlest scale in the thinnest coin. He has to wonder what Wart might think of it; is it a dying dream? Or a warning of some kind? And they could talk until the fear went away and only the message remained.

_Can_ the fear go away from a dream like that?

Albion untangles himself from the covers and the straw. Even here, even returning from the campaign and not yet at Camulodunum, Albion has a room of his own, or a tent in this case, the way Wart promised. Even if it's not what Albion wants, it's still good of Wart to think so—but even in the field, when Gwenhwyfar is back at Camulodunum, Wart won't share his bed with Albion.

_Well,_ Albion decides, _that ends tonight._ He gets to his knees first, and then his feet; he'll just go and sneak in, and Wart will wake up and deal with it—

The curtain parts before he gets there.

"Hallo, Britannia," the king says.

Albion catches his breath before he dares respond. Wart brought a torch to the tent with him, and its light sets all of him gold. He is without armor, without anything but a dark green cloak, the way Albion used to be. Albion can see Wart's bare shins and feet, and every hair casts a shadow that crosses the next. This war has made him old.

"Hallo," Albion murmurs, looking down but not away.

Wart sets the torch on a post outside, and comes fully into the tent as the flap shuts behind him. He kneels to Albion's level and parts his arms, but more for balance than to embrace him. Albion remains where he is.

"You're still here," Wart breathes. "Show me you're still here."

Albion shuts his eyes and comes forward, into Wart's arms, but says nothing.

"The fae have been saying you're not." Wart leans his forehead into the crook of Albion's neck and shoulder, his beard rough and grainy on Albion's bare skin. "Witch-dreams."

"Mine too," Albion whispers, but still doesn't raise his arms. He can't, not how he's being held, they're trapped against his sides. Is Wart still stronger?

Perhaps, if he holds on so tight. "Do I deserve it?"

"I don't think it matters," Albion says.

"I know about Gwenhwyfar and Lende," Wart goes on so quietly that Albion thinks it might be the fae and not him, "I know, and I'd care if I didn't want them to be happy, but I do. And I can't make either of them happy, they're not mine, and they don't love me the way they do each other. And Medraut—Medraut has no love for me at all, I know it only to _look_ at him, how he moves, how he wants. But he isn't mine either, and I can't rule what isn't mine. And I thought—I dreamt—that in trying to, I lost you too. That when I looked, you weren't you."

Albion asks, very softly, "What else could I be?"

Wart shivers, and Albion probably _would_ hold him now, if his arms weren't pinned against his sides. "The Orkneys are advising me that we can't just have the island—that we need to drive the Saxons off by invading their lands too, and bringing our people there." He breathes. "I don't know if it will work, but even if it doesn't—I'm not a Pict or a Gaul, I'm a Briton, and that means something different, doesn't it. And if I were to invade Gaul, would that make me—would that make _you_ like your brother?"

By now, Albion is shaking too. "Like which? Like how?"

"Like the one from the north, not the west," Wart says. "I don't want you to think that might makes right."

"If I did, I'd never have helped Rome build those walls to keep him out," Albion says, nearly laughing.

Wart almost laughs too; he pulls back a little, enough to show as much of his face as the dark will allow. "So even if we do invade—"

"It's not because I'm stronger," Albion says, "because I'm not. It's because I want it more."

"You're mine, Britannia—please say you're still mine."

Albion wriggles his arms out from under Wart's embrace, but only so he can throw himself back into Wart's arms, and hold him just the same. "I am," he whispers, "I _am_ yours, I won't ever become a Nation you can't rule, no matter if I grow—I promise, Wart, I promise—"

They do not kiss, but they topple to the floor and lay there together in the dark, with only Wart's cloak and each other for warmth. Albion touches what he can of Wart's frail spine, his muscles beginning to loosen, his hair softer for the intimation of grey. In time, it soothes the king to sleep.

And all through it Wart's heart is pounding, so loud against Albion's chest, and the dragon's words sour every beat.

-

"Are you _mad_?"

"I cannae stand for that accusation levied from the likes of you," Gawain snaps, hands on the table, his stool falling out of the curve. (In council, the men are always in a circle, to show they are only one side. It more often results in the idea of inner-and-outer, though, which is just as much us-and-them as anything else.) "I told you what our father can send. And where Lot goes, the whole of the nation follows, and I thought you wanted us off your backs at the wall, or was I mad to hear it?"

Bedwyr's the one to respond, not Wart. "You were mad to come here," he says, not rising from his seat but tilting up his chin. Albion, standing between him and Wart, can see up Bedwyr's hairy nose. "You know it's war with your ilk if it's not war beside you."

"Well, that's our way," Agravain says, behind his brother. "And it's always been our way, madness or not."

"So you had best hope we havnae run out of common enemies," Medraut adds, more beside than behind, nearly in the circle. He emphasises the dialect and lifts an eyebrow at Wart. "Though I don't think we can, in a world so wide."

"I won't deny that the Saxons will be back," Wart says, looking _away_ very pointedly, addressing the entire circle and the people beyond it. "And yes, taking a bit of their land on the coast might make our point. But what's to say that we can't do it to make peace with them?"

"Claiming their land in the name of peace?" Belnor asks, and laughs. "I'm older than you, lad, and I can still see the holes in that one."

He's not the only one to laugh—the joke ripples out through the crowd, and even Albion can't help but smile at the old dear. But Wart, once he's smiled as well, shakes his head and briefly shuts his eyes. "I mean for the future."

"We'll hate Saxony as much then as we do now," Gawain says. Gareth comes a bit forward to protest that, but Gaheris claps a hand on his shoulder and halts him, lets the eldest brother go on instead. "But Britannia, well—we've got fewer differences with you."

Above them, Caledonii is grinning, always grinning, and it's even more sinister with the iron washed off and the woad shining blue and clear. "C'mon, runt, how often do we get to share our blood?"

Albion doesn't mean to shiver, so he holds the edge of the table and tries to make his body still again. "If it's yours, you'll spill it."

Everyone but Medraut and Wart laughs at that one.

"You've been playing at war a hundred years," Caledonii chuckles, smirking, "with nothing to show but a comely little queen—"

"We drove them back without you!" Albion's fine with yelling now, but he holds back from stamping his foot. "We'd have finished them without you too."

"Or finished yourself trying." Caledonii sidesteps through the Orkneys and leans even farther over the table than Gawain, as if to draw a line across it with the spread of his arms. "Do you have any idea how many of them there are? I don't care if you chucked that golden little shit all the way back to Rome, runt, they're a cursed lot, and they count the dead among them. You've all seen it, haven't you?" he says, raises his voice and turns his head from side to side to draw everyone in, to make them watch the flicker of the symbols on his cheeks. "You've seen the woman that walks among them, the wight. Corpses walk in Gaul, my heroes, and if they walk they can hold a spear as fast as any living soul. If they don't make you food they'll make you the same as they. We cannae allow them to live—if what they have is life at all. And if they won't have graves, we'll have their heads on our pikes."

Albion's lost enough battles to know what it feels like. He closes his eyes, and looks to Wart—and Wart has raised his palms, not to yield but to concede.

"Fine," he says, "we will invade their lands. But _I_ will command the campaign, and call it off when I say it's overripe."

Gawain stands back from the table, straightening proudly, and jauntily cocking his head toward Caledonii. "I'd expect no less from the hero of Badon Hill."

Wart looks to Albion at that, and smiles warmly. "You're sure."

"I want to make sure Gallia is dead," Albion says truly. "And if he is, that he stays that way."

"Then it's settled," Wart says, half to Albion, half to Caledonii. "The venture is mine, and you're all party to it."

Caledonii's as smug as Gawain, if not more so. "So we sail from Dubris on—"

"No," Wart says. "Not Dubris."

Bedwyr protests, "but that's closest—"

"We'll sail from Cornwall. We're making the landing on Breizh."

All the eyes who know where to look have found Lende, cowled in the corner like more of a thief than a soldier. He stands very slowly, but comes forward with relative haste. His cloak trails and fans out, but the cowl does not, and he does not move the cloth from his mouth to speak. "Sire, I have no wish to return—"

"To Saxony, you said," Wart reminds him. "It won't be Saxony if it's ours. Can your people be moved?"

"If I am as they,"

"Or if they are as you. I can't imagine Saxony's treatment of Breizh is any better than his treatment of you. Will your father welcome us at Benoic?"

"Heartily, if it's him. If it's one of his sons, I can't say."

"You're still young, Lende. Let's hope it's your father, then."

"But who will guard Camulodunum?" _And by Camulodunum,_ Albion thinks, _he of course means his queen._

"I'm sure another soul can be spared the glory," Belnor says, reaching out to clap Lende on the shoulder. "Sire, what about Tristan?"

"You'll see him at Cornwall, if he's brought old Margh his bride yet," Wart reminds him. "And even if he's not, we can't hinge the campaign on waiting for him to return. Besides, Margh'll give us an army if we put him in charge of the coast, and we'll need Tristan to stay with him to ensure that."

"Parsifal, then."

"No offense meant, Belnor, but your little son's a Christian."

"Well, so's Lende."

"That's another reason he's not staying behind this time."

"I have little thirst for glory," Medraut says, sidling toward the table, "yet I come from a line of kings."

Albion's stomach churns, and it only worsens when he thinks of how Wart must feel.

Medraut smiles, bends, and offers Wart his hand. "Let me be denied the honour of serving beside you."

"And leave his realm in the hands of an Orkney?" Bedwyr says, raising one bushy white eyebrow to mirror Medraut's brown.

"Not the realm, just the care of it," Medraut says. "If you're so concerned, then stay back with me. I suppose he has other heirs?"

The set of Wart's jaw seems to age, forming the words, "I do not."

"Then this seems a fine plan to me." Medraut's black eyes don't shine at all, no matter the fire around the table. They're rather not like his mother's that way.

 

_A faerie perches on Albion's nose. It's a very small one, small enough that its glow doesn't cast on more than the nearest crease in the blanket. Albion blinks up at her, and it smiles favourably, shushing him with a fingertip between his eyes. He crosses them and blinks, but when it hops off, ears dragging, Albion follows it out into the halls._

The faerie scuttles through the mortared sections of stone. Every few steps he keeps checking back at Albion, who can't run nearly as fast, not when he's trying to be quiet. But it doesn't seem they have far to go; the faerie stops at a door, as far away from the iron hinges as it can stand without turning green (well, greener) in the face, pointing wildly. Albion catches up, and unbolts the door. It's toward one of the towers, and the faerie bolts in once the gap is wide enough and spirals up the stairs.

"He's doing this to keep us apart," Gwenwhyfar's voice echoes, down the inside stones just like the rain on the outside.

"Well that's his right," Lende says, lower, hoarse, less resonant. "He's still your husband."

"I still don't see why he's going along with this plan at all," she says. Albion can nearly see their shadows now, and climbs no higher. When the faerie catches on to that, it flits right back down to him and tugs on his ear. Albion grits his teeth and tries not to squeak or interrupt. "Invade Breizh? And Gaul? We barely have the power, let alone the reason."

"I can't say I agree with him either, but there is reason to it." Lende sighs, and Albion thinks that may be the strangest sound he's ever heard. Their shadows merge, and his tone lowers for the proximity. "And he has every reason to fear Orkney and their brethren, no matter what Gawain swears."

"And that fear guides him to place the island right into their hands?"

"His are bound, love."

Their silhouettes are so close now that Albion dares to peek around the corner and see just the reason for Gwenhwyfar's silence. Lende is half-bowed to her, and she is pawing at the cloth over his mouth. She must have just as much difficulty understanding him as Albion, the way she scrutinises his face. So Lende repeats it, and explains it, "His hands are bound. No matter what he does, there is war; he's just made the choice to have it on someone else's land. I know it's hard to see from Camulodunum but this land has clearly had enough."

"Don't patronise me," Gwenhwyfar snaps, pouting up at him. Even now that she's older, she's still small, still like a child, or at least Albion refuses to see her any other way. "I know war. I'm only here because of war, I'm only married to him because he's afraid of war."

"He's not afraid." It's easier to hear Lende when Albion can see his mouth moving, and he can like this, over Gwenhwyfar's head. "Not of war itself, at least."

"Oh? Then what's he afraid of?" Gwenhwyfar's tone is sour, and Albion's glad that he can't see her eyes right now.

"Losing," Lende says.

 

The faerie is with Albion when he wakes up, curled up under the straw. Albion focuses on the glow as it tapers through the stalks, hollows them out. He's alone again, isn't he.

But Wart can't have gone on the campaign yet, right? That needs more time to plan, and there's so much more to be done, and he wouldn't have left without telling Albion because Albion would be coming to Breizh or at least to Cornwall. He frowns, and tries to get a look at the window, see whether he should sleep more, or dream less.

There are bars on the window.

There's no standard on the wall.

The faerie in the straw isn't glowing much at all.

And when Albion tries to push up from the bed and get to his feet, a thick iron chain pulls him right back down.

There are a lot of logical things to do in a situation like this, he thinks distantly, and doesn't do any of them. Instead, he picks up the faerie (in the hand that's not cuffed with iron, he's not _stupid_) and shoves it out of the straw to make sure it's still alive. If it's still alive it just has to hide and wait for someone to open the door and then it can scuttle out and get Wart, or anyone who can help.

It's not still alive.

Albion clamps that hand over his mouth and tries not to scream. There's better he could do, he could chant all the spells he knows, but it's _iron_ and spells don't work on iron—he could cast the spells on himself instead to make himself strong enough to pry it out of the wall, but he can't concentrate, can't get his breath to steady or his head to clear—he could find something, anything that could get under the fixtures in the wall and pry it out, but there's nothing here but straw and the little faerie's corpse and no one here but him.

He could wait, or he could scream.

He _thinks._

He waits, for now. He might _need_ to scream later.

The faerie withers, in a room like this, with iron bars and an iron chain. They're meant for humans—or Albion supposes as much, because how could a chain for humans hold him unless there's something else at work? He thinks, morbidly, that once the faerie is dead enough there might be another clue, another reason why it spent its life to tell and then to stay.

He does know who's behind it, though, even before he opens the door.

"I cannae have you running to him," Medraut says, leaning against the jamb. "It'd be a tragedy for a Nation to abandon itself, even for a king, dead though he be."

The first thing that comes to mind as a retort is _and what would you know about kings?_, but that's an argument that Albion would lose—instead, he snarls, "And what would you know about Nations?"

"That I'm about to have one for my very own," Medraut says with complete seriousness, not a smirk or a snicker at all.

There are so many things Albion _could_ say to that, but all of them try to come out at once and all he actually says is, "You're wrong—"

"About what, having you? Unless you're hell-bent on destroying yourself for him, I'm fairly certain I do. And in that case, if I do not, then neither does he, and I'll be only a little less pleased with that."

He comes a step nearer, and Albion almost wants to wrap himself in the chain, if it'll hold Medraut off. He cringes—and remembers, lifting the chain to block his chest and looking Medraut in the eyes even if it makes him cringe.

"I'm not a monster," Medraut says, reaching down to pat Albion's hands. "I don't think you can ward me off with something that I put on you."

Albion holds on tight, and then throws the chain around Medraut's neck and pulls, _tight_.

Medraut doesn't get his hands up in time so Albion's got the chain looped taut on Medraut's neck and throws all of both their weight into it, pulling down and shoving Medraut back so that he doesn't quite topple. Medraut is groping at the chain, trying to part it and breathe and Albion just won't _let_ him—and then his thrashing pries the bolts from the wall, and the chain drags out like a flail, beating against the floor.

Albion finds it _much_ easier to look Medraut in the eye now. "No chain can keep a Nation from his king," he says, and gives it one more yank before parting his hands and running out of the room, dragging the iron behind him and leaving the usurper gasping around his own blood for air.

-

With the iron dragging behind him, it's much harder to run. He gets clear of Camulodunum to the Ermine road, but he crosses it before Londinium, and south before Verulamium, _away_ from all the cities on all sides. Even if the army must have taken the roads, without an enemy to stop them, he can't take Rome's roads, not with a cuff on his hand and a chain gathered in his arms. If he does the fae won't be able to help him at all. Even as it is, they can't come anywhere near him, just stand in the distance and gawk—and with this much iron on him he can't risk any of the rivers either.

He knows he won't beat the armies to Cornwall. He's pretty sure they'll be gone when he gets there. But Margh's a king even if he's not Albion's king, and if Wart said he'd leave Margh in charge of the coast then that's the only way he'll catch up with Wart at all, the only way Wart can know—and the only place Albion can heal enough to get the chain off to send the faeries after Wart, get him out of Gaul and _home._

And like this—in iron—he can't even pass near his mother's grave and ask her blessing.

He promises to do it after.

By the time he gets to Cornwall, he's starving, and his wrist is nearly thin enough for the cuff to slip right off. He also almost falls off the bridge and into the gorge—could that have hurt him? He doesn't know—but once there's no longer an other side to the rocks he does fall, but the distance is very short.

He remembers telling Wart, _I'm very tired._ Other than that, he sleeps without dreaming.

-

"Was I right, Margh, or was I right?" someone is shouting, in Cornwall's halls. "You've caught him in the act! Throw him off the cliffs for it."

"Not Tristan. Never. How _could_ he?"

Albion thinks, _Margh's gotten really old, hasn't he._

"Put that sword down, Mel. Even if he's cuckolded me, I'll treat decently with him. So Mel, put down the sword, and Tristan? Get my wife out from under your cloak."

Before Albion tries to get up, he lifts his hands to make sure that the chain is off his wrist. It is, and it and both his hands have been wrapped in clean cloth to cover up where the chain had chafed him. So that's fine—and the rest will be too, the pixies are wary of him, skulking in the corners and on the windowsill, but they're _there_, and that's enough.

Margh is busy, Albion decides, and if he's protecting Albion, that's enough for now.

"You owe me," he whispers to the pixies, beckoning with his stinging hands. "You owe me and I know who you are. Now bring Wart back to me."

 

_His dreams are proof that Gallia is not dead. Albion sees Wart, beating not a retreat but an abandonment, a dispersal, from Benoic, and once Wart's back is turned to the land Gallia is waving to him from the shore._

Gallia is older.

Not just older than Albion—which he may not actually be, but he always seemed it—Gallia is older, truly, more a youth than a boy. His chin is darker than the rest of his face. His hair is scragglier, his tunic and sword longer, his boots bursting at the toes. He stands as high as Wart did, when Albion first kissed him.

His smile no longer seems so angelic.

His mother stands behind him, her chin just barely higher than Gallia's hair. She looks with her lack of eyes right into Albion's, and curses him in the language they both know:

**You will live only as my son lives, and die only as he dies.**

 

"Britannia?"

Albion's convinced that he can call for Wart before he's even awake. But whether he actually shouts it or not he's in Wart's arms before he can say anything else. But even though this is a bed, and even though Albion's hands still hurt and he still feels cold and hungry and at war, he doesn't cry. Neither of them do. Neither of them smile either. They hold tight, and it's desperate and heavy, without fear but still without relief.

"I don't care if he's your son, Wart, I—"

"I want him out too, don't worry. I know." Wart's hand on Albion's back is steady but thin, and Albion can feel the knuckles raised from under his skin. "We'll march on Camulodunum once you've recovered."

"No we won't," Albion says, entirely serious. "We'll go now. Or as soon as the army can be moved. It can't wait, Wart, it can't, he's already saying you're dead in Gaul."

"But Bedwyr and Gwenwhyfar—"

"He'll _marry_ Gwenwhyfar. And then my brothers will come and kill me. Wart, you know what I am, and I know what you are, and we _don't have time._ We have to go now. Think, Wart," he whispers, pulling back but holding on. "Think. Remember. You said you could try to be like me—you said you could be everywhere, and feel what other people feel. You _are_ like that now, aren't you? But not like me, not with people—you feel what I do. Don't you?"

Wart breathes deeply, and answers, "Yes."

Albion nods to him. "Then you know it's not going to hurt me any less unless you win."

It takes another few deep breaths, but Wart does nod again, and close his eyes, and gather Albion up in his arms and carry him out of the room. Albion's about to say he doesn't need to be carried but it isn't really true, and besides, any chance to be in Wart's arms, he'll take. "You'll ride with me, is that all right?"

Albion groans. "Are there still no horses small enough?"

"Even if there are, I want you where I can see you."

-

They take the roads. Until the armies get past Durnovarium the roads aren't Roman, but they're still roads, and it's probably for the best, since you can't march an army through a forest. About a third of the men have gone with the ships and Margh, since Camulodunum can be taken from the sea (and because Margh needs to distract himself anyway); the rest are with Wart on land.

Albion finds it strange to watch the path he just took to get here, backwards; it's the same one, almost, that he and Wart took alone, when he brought Wart to Cornwall for the first time. It occurs to him to ask if they can stop by the ring of stone—Wart might want to pay Emrys his respects—but maybe it's best not to bring the whole army there. Well, two-thirds of it. It's another day's march, at least.

As they ride, Albion nestles against Wart's chest, a little more after each stretch of land. The armour that Wart wears now is not as heavy as he used to, or else his body is sparer underneath it, because Albion feels _very_ proximate, like Wart's torso has grown concave to accommodate him. The ends of his beard rub against Albion's forehead sometimes, if the motion of the horse makes him nod off. Even if there is war, it's somehow pleasant, that Albion is with the king he wants to win it, not waiting to be saved.

Well, his hands hurt, and there is still a red gash from the iron, healing under cloth on his wrist. But that gets a little better every night. And the fae come closer and closer, even if there are soldiers here. They probably smell a fight. They're right to.

"Sire!" One of the scouts—Lamorak's son, Albion thinks—runs up to Wart's horse, Belnor on his heels. "Sire, the—the enemy—"

"What, you caught an advance guard?" Wart wraps an arm around Albion's waist as he leans down to the scout.

"No, they're—they're actually here, they've left Camulodunum—I know what Medraut looks like, he's there—"

"How many?"

"Seven hundred—half of them horse."

Albion can feel the depth of Wart's breath, against his back. "All right, then. We haven't much time at all." Wart straightens, nods his thanks to the scout, and addresses all of the army that can hear him. "Lende—take twenty horse and fifty men with you to the coast. Catch Margh's attention, or beat him to Camulodunum to cut Medraut 's retreat off and save her." Her, Albion knows, is the Queen as well as the keep. Lende bows his head with evident relief, until Albion can't see any of it under the cowl. "The rest of us will make for the River Cam. There's a fort there, we'll make our stand at it. If they mean to meet us in battle, let us at least have the land at our backs."

The men cheer and make ready; Belnor musters the infantry and sends them off north, and Lende chooses his guard with a somewhat heavy hand. He looks at Wart more often than the men he selects, but Wart never meets Lende's eyes, and Albion knows it, and knows why.

They say nothing more to each other. Wart goes north, and Lende south and east, matched standards of the unicorn bannered behind them and the last rays of the sun upon both their necks. Albion sleeps in the saddle rather than watch either of them.

 

_It's already begun. It starts before they get there, fires already lit and arrows shot through them, men dying and fae screeching. They're on no one's side, Albion remembers, there's no difference between one born to them and one given to them, so they take whoever they want._

Half of Wart's cavalry get across the river, and a quarter of the kerns, before the arrows start to fly. The water belches steam wherever they hit it, and scant waves of heat where the dead and dying float. The hill itself looms black beside the river, the soldiers and the curling smoke setting patches of black against the stars. Medraut's on that hill. So is Caledonii.

Albion holds on as tight as the pain in his hands will allow, and sees through the dark.

It is not a great battle. It is a raid that strips the hill fort. The fires start to help each side tell friend from foe, and continue of their own accord until the corpses make a ring of it, the blood too thick and new for the flames to spread over it. Albion sees—and feels—Belnor fall, and one of his sons, and fifty kerns when the trees in the west catch fire and fall, already cut to topple.

Blood splashes across Albion's face again and again; Wart has taken up Germania's sword and is wielding it from horseback. He charges at Medraut's cavalry, only striking the kerns that dare to strike him first. No arrow can touch him, no fire frays his cape. Like this, Albion is armour enough, or at least that's what he hopes.

Medraut's silver horse rears from behind a wall of flames. Its hooves come down on the neck and cheek of Wart's horse, already spooked from the fire, and that's all the creature needs to set it frothing and mad. Albion falls off it before Wart does, ducks, and covers his head—a wave of blood crashes into him, he grits his teeth and prays—

 

"We had a pact, brother!" Gawain yells, kicking the flesh of Medraut's horse off his sword before turning back to the melee and paying Medraut no more heed. He is soon swallowed by the battle, and Albion's heart aches for him, whether he survives this slaughter or not.

But Gawain's kindness has left Medraut and Wart—staggered, but not broken—staring at each other across the bodies of their steeds, weapons at the ready. Wart has Germania's sword but no shield; Medraut a short blade and shield, hanging too low and too heavy on his arm.

They don't say anything either, but Wart bellows, drawing back with both hands to swing. Albion buries his ear in the horse's corpse so that he hears less of it, but can't take his eyes away, and he sees the blades spark when they crash together, Wart's scraping down the entire short length of Medraut's before he withdraws. Medraut comes at him with jabs and swings, from the side and above, one right after the other—Wart parries them each in turn, bracing his heel on the head of the horse that Albion is cowering behind to turn one of those parries into an upward slice, forcing Medraut to dodge. That arc drew a line, _my space, my realm_, and Albion shivers to see it.

With the reach of that sword defined, they circle each other, a ring within a ring, clearing a path through the fallen. The ground isn't even—at one point, Medraut is as tall as Wart, when he is higher on the hill—and Albion tries to follow Wart and keep behind him, grabbing a weapon (it hurts to hold) and guarding his back. Medraut catches him at it, and laughs, but that's just enough for Wart to charge at him again, swatting at his shield-arm. It's already lagging, and can't take a blow from a sword that heavy, even from lower ground—Medraut cries out and wrings that arm, barely throwing it into place to block Wart's redoubled strike and Albion _hears_ the bone crack. He cheers.

—That was a mistake, because Wart heard it too.

Medraut takes the same opportunity that Wart just had. He gets in a stab up under Wart's arm—it connects, but not deeply, and Wart's groan is more of a hiss that the swing of his blade takes up. Medraut's too close for Wart to take a swing but not too close to be hit at all, and Wart bludgeons him with the hilt, right over the ear. That sends Medraut almost to his knees, tripping a body's length down the hill before he manages to turn. But Wart is already rushing level to him, the sword drawn back for a horizontal strike at the level of his neck—

The very tip of the blade slices deep into Medraut's throat, almost three-quarters of the way, from side to side. His head does not quite fall off, but lolls uncomfortably to the side, while his body remains in a forward lunge, inclined up the hill. It seems very strange to Albion that Medraut's sword should remain level if he's that certainly dead, and he remembers what Caledonii told everyone about Gaul, and Gallia's Maman, and a chill runs through Albion all the way to the base of his brain before he even sees that the sword has a very good reason to remain level even as its soldier falls.

He stabbed Wart. In Rome's place.

Wart actually falls faster than Medraut does, probably because Medraut doesn't have any control over it and Wart _knows_ he's been hurt. He drops the sword and clasps his hands over his belly, and the blood trickles out through his fingers. Albion drops whatever weapon he'd picked up, he doesn't care anymore, and puts his hands there too, maybe that'll be enough to stop it—

"Britannia." Wart laughs. "Are you bigger, or am I dying?"

There's no good answer to that, so Albion kisses him. Their hands are entwined over the blood, and it's slippery which just means Albion has to hold on tighter, and with everything he has, so he does. He kisses hard enough to topple Wart to the hilltop, hard enough that they slide down it together, hard enough that even when they slip he won't fall away. He traps Wart between his legs and his lips and his teeth, and soon his face is getting slippery too but that just means tighter, hold him tighter—

"—not—" Wart groans right into Albion's mouth, around their tongues—_their_ tongues, he's kissing too, "—I—don't want to do this in front of everyone—Dying, I mean," when Albion shivers, "you can kiss me wherever you like…"

So Albion doesn't stop, but—but he does pull away enough that Wart can get up. There aren't many people standing, probably no one close enough to hear, so Albion gets himself under Wart's arm to hold him up and doesn't bother looking for a horse. He tries to take the sword too, maybe Wart can use it for a crutch. It'll get them far away enough.

They make it to the river before Wart has to fall on his knees again. Albion helps him. The sword topples onto the riverbank, and Albion goes to fetch it—

—and then Wart stops him, puts an arm out, and shoves the sword into the river. "I don't want it anymore, I just killed my son with it."

"All right," Albion says, and instead of retrieving it, he helps it along, pushing it through the sand until he can't see it anymore. The river isn't that deep, but at least it should rust it away. There's time for that, at least. The river also washes some, but not all, of the blood from Albion's skin, though the bandages on his hands are soaked through with it now. He starts to unwind them. Maybe if the river cleans them a little he can wrap them on Wart instead. "How far away do you want to go? Should I build a raft?"

"You don't want me to leave you, right?"

"No, no, I'll go with you—but if you don't want to be here—well, I don't want to be here either."

"You _are_ here," Wart laughs. His voice is quieter.

"I'm more than here," Albion reminds him.

Wart doesn't laugh at that one, but the faeries do.

He builds the frame of a coracle out of bark and reeds, and the fae bring him a horsehide from the battle. It reeks, but Albion tells them to dip it in the river first, and then he drapes it over the cage, securing it with knots. Wart helps as much as he can at first, using his weight, but it tires him out, and by the time Albion finishes the boat he's nearly asleep.

Albion nudges him. "Wart? Wart, it's done."

"Mm," Wart says, and just nestles closer to him. Even if his features are old, his smile is young again at least.

"Do you want to go now?"

"I don't want to go ever," he says, and wraps his arms around Albion's. The wound's not bleeding anymore at first, at least not through the wet cloth, but there's acid on the edges once he tries to stand up and get into the coracle. Once he's pushed the boat off the shore Albion clambers in, and there isn't much room, but he sits in Wart's lap and holds in all the blood he can.

Wart drapes his arms over Albion's back again and cradles him, even if Wart's the one that needs cradling now. "Where does this river go?"

"Into a bigger river," Albion answers.

"And that river?"

"Another one, but that one goes to the sea."

Wart hums contentedly at that, and kisses what of Albion he can reach. Albion accepts that, eagerly, even if it hurts. There are more kisses as they drift, for hours, but not many words at all, until they follow the north turn of the river, toward the bay that splits Albion's part of the island from Cymry's.

"Britannia," Wart says, very softly, lifting a hand from Albion's back and trying to point, "there's no more river."

The name, more than anything else, makes Albion cry. "Don't—don't call me that. It's what Rome called me. It's not my Name."

Wart tilts his head.

"But I won't tell you it," Albion says. "I'll just give it to you."

"Your Name?"

"_Your_ Name, now."

"It won't keep me alive," Wart whispers.

Albion kisses him between the eyes. "But it _will_ help you come back."

Wart laughs, or very nearly. His brow wrinkles. "Will it?"

"Yes," Albion says, and he tries to keep the tears out of it so it doesn't sound like a lie. "Yes. You have to come back. You have to come back to take your Name back from me, when you want it again. Or when I can't use it anymore and need mine."

"I will, then," is the last thing Wart manages to say.

-

**584 A.D.**

Cymry comes to him in the woods. He brings bread, and weapons, and news of the Saxons that have settled all across this land, encroaching on his own.

"Our people are putting up a good effort," Cymry says, when they are settled in the cave that the local madman lives in. "Caledonii's too. I have a hero now, a Gwawrddur."

"Your names make no sense."

"If you say so." Cymry rolls his eyes, but goes on, even handing him some bread. "But still, he's holding them off. They said that the ravens would follow him because they knew they'd be fed."

"Said?"

"He's dead now," Cymry clarifies.

"Then he was no Arthur," _England_ says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Citations for Part 5**
> 
> [The Map](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Roads_in_Britannia.svg).
> 
> [Medraut](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordred).
> 
> [The Invasion of Gaul](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riothamus).
> 
> [Tristan, get my wife out from under your cloak](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_and_Iseult).
> 
> [The Battle of Camlann](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camlann).
> 
> [A coracle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coracle).
> 
> [Some of my arguments](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_basis_for_King_Arthur).
> 
> [The local madman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrddin_Wyllt).
> 
> [_He was no Arthur_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Gododdin).

**Author's Note:**

> **Citations for Part 1:**
> 
> [The Fall of Rome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_rome) and [The Roman Departure from Britain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_departure_from_Britain).
> 
> [A handy map.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Roads_in_Britannia.svg)
> 
> [Ambrosius Aurelianus / Emrys Wledig,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelius_Ambrosius) and [Dinas Emrys](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinas_Emrys).
> 
> [Vortigern](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortigern) and [Y Ddraig Goch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Ddraig_Goch).
> 
> The idea of "Wart" as a name for young Arthur was popularized by T.H. White's [The Once and Future King](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_And_Future_King).


End file.
